Friday Family round-up, 4th March – 10th March 2016

This week’s Friday family round up is coming to you live from a darkened bedroom where I sit propped up in bed, cocooned with a whingey baby who refuses to sleep on her own. I suppose I should be grateful for laptops that let me do that and the fact she’s asleep at all, which she often wasn’t, earlier this week. I would, however, like a little time off from being a need-meeting machine and that’s been in precious short supply lately. Oh well. Only 17 more years and she’ll be off to uni (insert a few rousing bars of ‘always look on the bright side of life’ here, as I weep softly into my chocolate).

Just another ordinary week here. The Man finally – miraculously – finished tinkering with the car having fixed what ailed it after 8 months of hard labour. It now goes, to borrow his phrase of choice ‘like shit off a shovel’. Or ‘fast’ for those of us not brought up immersed in the vernacular of the West Midlands.

Both the smalls attended a 4th birthday of one of The Boy’s friends. Whilst there a balloon exploded in The Girl’s face. There was a collective indrawn breath from the assembled parents, a gasp, held, waiting for the other shoe to drop and the high pitched wail for terror, pain and fright to begin. Nothing happened. It was like an interrupted orgasm. The Girl just looked around with a ‘Hey, where’d my balloon go?’ expression. What can I say? Living with a 4 year old brother (esp one as high spirited as The Boy) makes a baby really bombproof!

Other than that The Girl has mostly been getting into pickles through her climbing and her favourite place to be this week has been sitting in the large box of Duplo or on the brick truck with her legs posted through the handle. What can I say, it makes her happy

The Boy has been having a pretty good week. He did a lovely drawing of Grandpa’s dog for Grandpa. It had a whiskery nose and four legs with feet on the end that looked like little boots, but then he realised the feet were too far back on the body and the dog would fall over, so he added three more at the front for good measure. You have to admire those kind of problem solving skills. No decent photos of him this week unfortunately, except for this lovely one of him with his sister when he decided to copy her by also sitting in a toy box. His toy of choice was Brio, though – not sure it’s any more comfortable than Duplo mind!

We made chocolate crispie nests with mini eggs in, too. They were delicious and didn’t last very long at all. They were rather premature for Easter, but what with the earliness of Easter this year, and the high preponderance of family birthdays in March, it was pretty much our last chance before we start on the myriad of birthday cakes!

The high point of our week was probably Saturday morning when it started snowing big fat flakes. Nothing settled, though and it soon stopped leaving The Boy shouting out of the window and ordering the sky to ‘Start snowing again AT ONCE. I MEAN IT!’. Now why can I hear the ghostly echo of my own words in there…?