Summertime...

... and the living is easy.

The Boy Wonder has come to the Shire sans parents, to stay with his maternal oldies overnight. I engineered this trip on hearing that an evening's babysitting was on offer, because I want to make sure that he feels completely at home in our house, even though he doesn't visit all that often because of the geographic distance between us. But then he got the recent quite nasty virus and went... let's say, a bit fratchy... and I started to wonder what on earth I'd let us in for.

Luckily the virus has been thoroughly shaken off over the last few days, and yesterday we had a very reassuring message from L: when she picked him up from nursery, B was, she said, "0% cuddles and 100% scamp." So early this morning we drove to Monmouth and so did she, meeting at the car park of The Kymin to transfer the Boy and about a hundredweight of paraphernalia from her car to R's. B obviously thought this was a pretty strange occurrence - and it was - but he took it all completely in his stride, and waved goodbye to his mother perfectly cheerfully as we went our separate ways.

Once back at our house we gave him lunch (ninner), and then loaded him into the car again, where he napped as we drove into Stratford. We then walked him along the river, fed the swans, and ate some ice cream. Then home again for playing, dinner (ninner), more playing, bath, and bed.

He's been absolutely charming all day, and hasn't shown even the tiniest sign of homesickness. There's yet time, of course, for the trip to go badly wrong - it's going to be a roasting night, for one thing, which won't help any of us sleep well - but so far we're delighted with the visit, and very pleased that I decided to make it happen.