Wild Wednesday

I slept surprisingly late this morning, waking only just before L and G were due to be leaving us for a baby-free spa day. By the time I'd scurried through washing and dressing, and got myself downstairs, Baby B had already been up for several hours, fielded by his father and grandfather, and had eaten his own breakfast and some of R's. This didn't stop him powering through half of my morning yogurt - though I was allowed all the lumpy bits of fruit - and demanding some more toast ("Toas'!") as soon as the bread came out of the bread bin. I gave him a piece with cashew butter on it, but it transpired shortly afterwards that what Tiggers really like is Marmite.

After Mummy and Daddy had left - "Byee!" said B cheerfully, with a dismissive wave - I produced my secret weapon: a box of small plastic  trucks with friction drives, which have been a big hit all day because they run really well on all kinds of flooring, and he can make them go all by himself. This toy produced the second new word of the day, which started out as "Digguh!" but later morphed into "Digdig", because dig, dig, dig is what it does.

Half way through the morning we went to Waitrose to pick up a few odds and ends, which was also, to my slight surprise, a huge hit. Being a child of the supermarket delivery generation, I'm guessing that B doesn't get taken into enormous stores and pushed around in a trolley very often - certainly that was the impression we got, as he held very tight to the trolley handle, and gazed around him with eyes like saucers. He behaved beautifully though, even helping us at the checkout, and then carefully carried a pot of hummus home in the car.

Then it was lunch time ("MEAT!!"), and after that we went to Stratford. We had a good play in the playground at the 'rec (which was blissfully quiet on a school afternoon) - including B directing operations ("Digdig!") while R operated a manual digger in the sandpit. I'm not sure which of the two of them enjoyed this more. When we'd tried all the good equipment in the playground, we walked through the park and along the river bank, singing Row, row, row your boat at the tops of our voices without the slightest hint of embarrassment, every time (i.e. every few seconds) a boat went along the river.

And, as you can see, we discovered puddle stamping. There were two puddles on the wharf, a few yards apart, and he went back and forth between them for a looong time, to the great amusement of quite a few passers-by. One of whom suggested that wellingtons might have been a good idea, which was clearly true, but as it was clearly also too late to be trying to go there from where we already were, I just smiled and shrugged. Another man, passing by on a mobility scooter, caught R's eye and simply said, "Got to be done."

Eventually we made it over the Tramway Bridge and up into town, and went to a café for revitalising coffee (R and me), and cake (all of us). Then back home for more games with the trucks ("Bump!"), and dinner. This was a pesto pasta dish with olives and pancetta, which has been a regular meal in our house for about thirty years now, but in all that time I've never served it to anyone who's eaten it with as much relish as B did this evening. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that he had a bigger portion than I did, and he ate every last morsel and still asked for more. The absolutely best thing about it was the pancetta, and during the course of the meal "MEAT!!!"  was said so often that it had time to develop variations: "Mea'meat", and (my favourite) "Mea'ymeat". He does a good glottal stop, the Boy Wonder.

By the time we arrived at the bath-and-bed routine he'd remembered that he's now rising two, and gave us one or two appropriately terrible moments, but he then went, in surprisingly short order, from a flat refusal to entertain even pyjamas, let alone the notion of getting into his cot, to snuggling down with his furry toys and allowing me to sing him to sleep. It's a source of some irritation to me that despite the fact I've never liked old music hall songs, when push comes to shove those are the ones that I can actually remember. The Boy's favourite tonight was My Old Man Said Follow the Van, which I had to sing about a dozen times before I realised - to my profound relief - that he'd slipped off to sleep.

It's now 10pm, and as I'm toadally zorsted, and tomorrow is scarily close, I'll wish you as peaceful a night as I'm hoping for, and sign off.