Welcome home cabbage

He'll really appreciate it. Especially the roast venison it's going to be served with. Mr B is finally in the air and on his way home after an extra day in London for some charidee work. Much as I know the ranks of folk helped by this charity (present company included) will be helped by his input today, selfishly I'd rather he'd been here to get the kids up in time for K's early basketball start, make her lunch, hurry her up, get the tats out of her hair so it could be tied back in standard basketball style, drive her there and (avoiding all kissy greetings due to lergy) swap phone numbers to arrange pick-up time.

Because then I could have stayed in my lovely warm snuggly bed and, it is just possible, my head would have felt slightly less like exploding than it did. However, I would then not have made it to the market early enough to park within a mile of the market, and therefore not been able to contemplate a trip to the material stall to buy enough (very heavy) material to make curtains for Katherine's room. The man looked delighted when I told him that the 7m of fabric and 14m of lining were for one room... and that there were 7 more lots to go in due course. So he gave me a free tablecloth.

Eventually the hundredweight of cloth was hauled back to the car, and I could get back to bed..... Well not quite. First came the annoyingly thankless task I started the other day. And then the day was almost gone.

Happily I managed to spot the first few drops of rain and get the washing in; unhappily the rain was at its peak of tropical downpourness when I had to pick K up from her minibus (they won!) but happily I had an umbrella in the boot.

So now the kids have spent the whole evening watching one of those home video show in France with people hurting themselves. Very funny. Though it is, of course, a bit hard for me to tell when it tips over some invisible time threshold and becomes rude. So I send them to bed when they stop laughing and start sniggering. Seems about right. Also tonight we had a little lesson on internet safety, since the kids now have access to the internet on my old laptop in the dining room. I left them to it after a wee chat, saying they must ask me if there's anything they're not sure about or want to check. They called me back a few minutes later... to explain the rules of patience. Which they then played for an hour. I think the internet is safe from them for a little while.