What happens on Thursday!

 It’s Thursday again! 

The small boy arrives at my house bright and early as usual. I have the ancient toy farm set organised ready. We spend some time transporting plastic bales of hay around on a plastic farm machine. It makes a change from driving toy monster trucks all over then living room carpet. Mind you, the plastic farm machines have to have conversations in the same way that toy monster trucks do. 

After some time he declares himself starving hungry and we head down to the kitchen for coffee for me and “sweetibix” (Weetabix with honey) for him. There is a request for the “planets song”, of which I know only the first line. So we find it on YouTube and spend some time singing it over and over - this does not mean I remember the correct order of the planets that go round our sun - before moving on to other children’s songs and stories. 

On the principle that small children should not spend too much time glued to a small screen, I take a unilateral and marched him off to make shapes with PlayDo. As he wants to keep some of the fishy creatures we have created, something not worth doing with PlayDo, we progress to air-dried clay, slightly messier but more satisfying in the longterm. We decorate fishy shapes and sea-shell shapes with coloured beads and in a couple of days he will be able to paint them. 

Next we go exploring. The earlier quite torrential rain has given way to intermittent sunshine and so we set off to the “sandy park”, a favourite destination, spotting interesting things and meeting interesting dogs along the way. Some dogs are amazingly strange creatures. A quite large, woolly creature some yards ahead of us hears the little fellow singing and just plain refuses to go any further until she has had a chance to try to wash the child’s face with her tongue. “Holly just loves children,” says her doting owner! “She looks like a donkey!” says our Lewis. 

We do get rained on, but not substantially. And we spend some time digging up sand at the “sandy park” with one of the plastic farm machines that has gone along with us. By then it is almost time for Mummy and big sister Lydia to turn up at my house after school. 

The toy farm set comes into its own once more, with a lot of imaginative input from big sister. And we all have scrambled eggs for tea, as we often do on a Thursday. 

Lydia and Lewis decide after eating to go for a runaround in the garden, now that the threat of rain has seriously diminished. They are entranced by the number of tiny sycamore seedlings growing all over the grass and almost stage a major protest march at the suggestion that Grandad might mow the grass: “Don’t let Grandad kill the forest!” When the time comes to get ready to go home, dropping Granddad at chess club en route we have another rebellion. Nobody wants to come inside. This is what happens when you put the clocks forward and have longer evenings! 

Then Lydia spots a bumble bee and has a major panic. They both head indoors. Lydia screams, “There’s a bee in the kitchen! There’s a bee in the kitchen!” I send them through the side garden to the front door and hurry up to open that door for them. When I go down againmthere is no sign of the bee, which I could hear buzzing earlier. I close the back door, assuming he has had the sense to exit and then get on with some tidying up. Then I hear him again and eventually spot him: the biggest, noisiest bumble bee I have seen in years. So I switch out all lights and fling the door open again - no, that’s wrong, I wrestle the door open as it is slightly swollen and sticks - and go to find a window lock key. Eventually I find the correct key, cursing the fact that each window seems to need a slightly different key. Of course, I am too short reach across the kitchen sink to the window and so I have to get the step-stool. I manage to open the window and get on with the washing up, keeping an eye on Bumble as he eventually makes his way out! Phew!

Earlier in the day Lewis and I watched a children’s programme about bees. This told us that bees can lead others from their hive to good sources of nectar when they find them. So why can’t a stupid bumble bee not find his way to an open window in less than 15 minutes?

And the panicky rush indoors means that there are muddy footprints all over the place. It’s a good job we got the vacuum cleaner working properly again!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!