Monday with Luca and Eben

School holidays, so Eben came with Luca for Monday morning, then Josh picked him up after lunch. It was lovely to have them here together.
Luca stayed on with us for the afternoon.
With the gloomy, chilly weather, neither of them wanted to go to the park (or anywhere outdoors). But they both love making things, dismantling them and making them again. They 'helped' Richard with the fiddly job of replacing the battery in the wonderful little Brio engine that is part of a building kit (like Meccano, but much simpler and mostly made of wood).  The little engine has 3 buttons: forward, reverse and stop. These are enough to create the basis for many excellent constructions and manoeuvres.
Luca got so tired, by mid-afternoon, that he fell fast asleep on the floor in the living room.  He has now got wise to every nap-promoting trick, so things that used to work when he's tired - like a trip in the pushchair, or a cuddle and a drink of warm milk - definitely don't any more. But he will sometimes drop off on his own, if he's tired enough (and if he doesn't feel someone else has foisted the idea on him). Waking him up for the drive back to Josh and Ruth's produced a predictable storm, however... but we got over that eventually, as always, and Richard and I drove him back together.