…and such an urchin, with permanently bruised shins and grazed knees. She has about 3 or 4 words, mostly gibberish to anybody but me  (gagaga – with quack hand gesture = any bird. Hee hee hee = horse. Maa! – me or Maggie or Tamsin or comeherenow. tatata = drink now please. Dad-n = daddy or Tamsin. roro = …your boat. ba ba ba = round and round (as in what the wheels on your bus do), fff = fish*), but who’s comparing (with Maggie’s over-60 and Tamsin’s well, a few): she can make herself Very Well Known indeed.

* interesting – to me at least – how similar the list is to Tamsin’s list at the  same age.

(a la Earthenwitch). Right now I am:

cuddling a sad and bruised youngest daughter and wondering where all the blood came from (update: she’s fine, just got a huge fat lip. Teeth all intact.)

Packing. And fretting. We appear to have extremely nervous buyers who have now sent three surveyors round (and the third, this morning, warned me that a fourth might be forthcoming). Fortunately I have surveyor-charming skills and have made them all tell me what they find (I’m not supposed to tell you but). Seriously: they are buying a 110-year-old house, it is going to have, ahem, quirks. Features. Oddly, their solicitor does not seem to know they are doing all this. On which note…

waiting for our solicitor to call me back. Nothing so far has led me to believe the poor woman knows how to operate a telephone.

reading umpteen magazines (crafty homey ones, mostly) while resolving to kick the expensive, pointless magazine habit.

trying to get a reading group off the ground: who’d have thought it would be so difficult to get more than two people together in the same place, with books, at the same time.

making (a mess, ha ha) – lazy-days skirts. Flowers for M and hungry-caterpillar circles for T.

editing some nonsense about dogs

using up the contents of fridge/freezer/cupboard with weird and unpredictable results.