NotSheep

The sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day. This is, of course, due to the fact that on Friday evening, after a couple of weeks of wind, rain and hailstones, I moved all my pots of vegetable seedlings back into the conservatory. I’d already lost some onions and cucumbers – they drowned, would you believe! – so now the conservatory looks like a greenhouse. And it’s sunny.

Well of course

Making the most of the sun and dry weather, we cleared out the garage yesterday – a long-overdue chore. There was a lot of debris in there; this is what happens when you live with people who think that “putting away” means “find a space it will fit in and drop it there”. Many hours of work later, the garage is clean and shiny – okay, not shiny, but it is tidy and many spiders were left homeless in the process – and much stuff has been thrown out, and much stuff has been put in the back of the car to go to the charity shop, and even more has been offered on the local freecycle list. Indeed, quite a few things have already been collected. Quite why we had a Barbie skateboard, half a bag of post-concrete and a mini hockey-stick, I don’t know, but I’m happy to see them go.

The back door of our garage leads into the kitchen, and so the garage also houses a sink, cupboards, the washing-machine and dryer, the freezer, etc. A couple of years ago, I used the chest freezer and some shelving to split the garage into two halves – the back end being the “utility area” and containing all the above as well as the side-door which leads to the driveway. The front half houses bicycles and skateboards and skates and balls and bats and kites and pop-up tents and all the other stuff that accumulates when you have children (and, perhaps, particularly when you have boys). This system of “two halves of a garage” works very well for us…when there’s not a metre-high pile of – well, everything you can imagine – strewn through it. I am pleased to say that I can now get to the freezer without climbing over a sack of potatoes, and that I can reach the laundry area without falling over a bucket, and that I can open the cupboards without moving a stroller and sixteen boxes. As for the front half, the bicycles can now be removed without risking life and limb from unidentified falling objects, and I can even access the fusebox by moving only one item

We did some bicycle maintenance while we had them all out – George has moved up onto the bicycle that Barney was riding last year, and Barney is now the official owner of the one adult bicycle that we possess. It’s a bit of a sobering thought that he now rides the same size bicycle as his parents.

As well as garage-blitzing, we’ve been planning Freddy’s birthday party for this weekend – well, I’ve been pointing out (for several weeks) that it’s getting closer, and that if he wants a party, he needs to do something about it. He and George finally designed, drew and delivered invitations for local people over the weekend, and emails and text-messages have been sent to those a bit further away. George and Freddy now consider the party to have been organised. And all I have to do is shop for it and cook for it…

And we’ve got Cub Camp and Scout Camp coming up, not to mention more OU tutorials for Barney and continued fencing/ju-jitsu/everything else for the various people who participate. The new ju-jitsu class is going well, and Freddy and George are much more settled in it than they were in the old one. Jack would love it too, if I’d let him go – and I’ve told him I’ll let him go just as soon as he starts paying some attention to what we tell him. So far, he has not had much success in that.

Louie has become very sociable, chatting lots and smiling more – he’s been a very serious little chap until now, so I am very pleased to see him getting cheerier. He has also, however, decided that sleep is not something he’s interested in at nights. I am not so pleased about that

A good thing about having big kids when you’ve got little kids: they can hold the baby while you hang out the laundry. A bad thing about having big kids when you’ve got little kids: they teach your little kids stuff. Today Toby has been wandering up to people, saying “Beep off!” and laughing. I haven’t censored that, by the way; those are his exact words: “Beep off”.

I think I’ll beep off and have a bath.