'Mazin'

"Look at that!" I said, lifting B at the kitchen window, and showing him the snow falling thick and fast outside. "Snow!"

"Yes. 'Noe," said B.

"Wow!" I said. "Wow," replied B agreeably, in the tone of a Boy who thinks it's polite to indulge his Oldies' enthusiasms.

"It's amazing!" I said - because it was, in fact, totally unexpected, and therefore rather amazing. "'Mazin'," responded B, equably.

The Boy Wonder may have been unimpressed, but without wanting to big myself up too much, I think I can claim a fair dollop of credit for having managed to conjure up any enthusiasm about anything this morning. The night had been a swings and roundabouts situation: better than Friday, in the sense that I did at least get to spend six hours of it asleep in my own bed, but worse insofar as it ended abruptly at 4am, when I was summoned by a sobbing child. He allowed himself to be calmed pretty quickly, but then made it absolutely clear that he was done with sleeping, and was now getting up. By the time I'd worked through my entire range of strategies, to no avail, it was getting on for 5am, and I accepted defeat and settled for containment - keeping him quietly entertained in his room, to make sure that R could get enough sleep to be safe driving us all over to Wales this afternoon.

By 6am the containment strategies were also wearing thin, so we went downstairs for breakfast ("EGGY, EGGY EGGY!!"), and it was then, glancing out of the tower window and down onto the conservatory roof, that I first realised it might be snowing. At that time the street lights out in the lane revealed just a fine dusting, but by the time dawn broke the snow was coming down in thick, heavy lumps. I took both this photo and the first extra at about 9.15am, by which time the garden had almost disappeared, and even B found it pretty 'mazin'.

Today is L's birthday, and once we were back in the warmth of the house I told B about this, and explained to him that it's a nice thing to give presents to people we love when it's their birthday. "So, shall we make a present for Mummy for her birthday?" "No," said B. "Yes," I said, firmly. "We are going to make a present for Mummy for her birthday. We're going to make her some chocolate cookies." "Chokyit coo'ies!" said B, cheering up immediately. "Yes," I said. "Chocolate cookies. As a present for Mummy." "Pezzen'!" said B, who by now was almost bouncing with enthusiasm.

So we made chocolate chip cookies, and R snapped the second extra on his phone while we were working (as much as anything so I could show L that B really had helped to make them). I had to improvise the recipe, because it turned out that both my plain flour and my chocolate chips were out of date, but the cookies still turned out pretty well. When they were cool we put them in a pretty box and tied a ribbon round it, and labelled it with two gift cards, which B drew in multicoloured crayon under R's supervision. ("Which of these cards are we using?" I asked. R gave me a severe look. "Both of them, of course," he replied. "That one says "Happy birthday Mummy", and that one says "Lots of love from B".")

By this point we were on a tight schedule, and there was a flurry of activity as we gave the Boy his lunch, collected all his gear together, and packed the car - though in the interests of us all leaving the house as friends, I did consent to let B wash his hands one last time in the bidet in our bathroom. As he walked across the landing he stopped and frowned at something small and dark on the carpet, then bent down and picked it up. "Tchum," he said off-handedly, dropping it into my hand. I thought, You know things are getting bad when the 2-year old is critiquing your housekeeping, but then I glanced down at the tchum and discovered that it was in fact a woodlouse, which had been wandering along, minding its own business and presumably looking for somewhere to hibernate. Surprisingly, it survived its meeting with B, though I can't honestly say it looked happy, so I popped it into a houseplant and left it to recover its equilibrium.

Once in the car it took less than five minutes for B to fall asleep, and he stayed that way for the next hour and a half (zorsted, of course, after being hauled out of bed by Djiwl at 4am), and was somewhat bemused to wake up in the car park at Tredegar, with both his parents beaming and waving at him through the window. He soon perked up though, handed over his pezzen' to Mummy, and ate two of her cookies with some milk while the grown-ups were having sandwiches and hot drinks in the café. L messaged us later and said that all the way home in their car he kept saying ,"Bye bye Dad house, bye bye Djiwl house," - which I confess made me more than a little bit tearful.