Basking

"Would you like your slippers on?" I enquired this morning, eyeing the Boy Wonder's bare feet. "No," he replied. "I don't like them."

There was no arguing with that, though I felt mildly crushed (R and I having bought them for him). But I did admire both the assertiveness and the grammar. However when I told his mother this story, she rolled her eyes and said that not liking something or other is this week's big thing: yesterday, she told me, he repeatedly said "I don't like pasta," while wolfing down an entire bowlful.

One thing he definitely does like is the cow milk R and I take with us in a small flask to put in our tea and coffee (his parents favouring oat milk, which I can't abide). This morning, presumably having been told that it was our day to visit, B asked repeatedly for cow milk from getting up onwards, and by the time we'd been in the house an hour he'd drunk a large portion of our day's supply. Thus we wound up walking down the road to the local convenience store to buy some more, where the Boy was very interested in looking at and naming things: "Apple. 'Mato. Cow milk. Toast. Oh!" - toast being a loaf of sliced bread, and oh! being a shelf of chocolate, from which, luckily, he was surprisingly easily deflected to go and help R pay for the milk.

After his lunch, during which I discovered that another of the things he doesn't like is carrot, and was required to remove every offending morsel from his cottage pie, we went off out to the park. Because it was a lovely day, and he'd enjoyed the earlier walk to the shops so much, we asked if he'd like to try walking to the park rather than riding in the pushchair, and he managed almost the entire half mile - on legs that are really quite little - before we ran out of time and had to scoop him into the pram for his nap. This was met with extreme disfavour, because being deprived of his autonomy is something else he's not fond of, but the almost-half-mile walk had done its stuff, and within a couple of minutes he was asleep.

While R did pram circuits I wandered around the park photographing flowers and examining the trees for interesting fungi and lichens, but they were immediately forgotten when this Red Admiral fluttered past me and settled on a sunlit leaf. I stalked it for several minutes, only putting it to flight, briefly, once, and in the end I was able to get right in to the minimum focus distance of the nifty fifty lens to get this shot. The ground was still pretty muddy after the recent flooding, and I ended up with a bad case of invert photographer's knee - I looked as though I'd gone rusty, and felt much the same way - but it was worth it to capture my first invertebrate photo of the season.

Once the Boy was up and about again we noodled around for a while, watching a man with a tractor rolling the football pitch, and admiring various handsome dogs, but then had a few rather sad minutes when two of the staff from the baby nursery B used to attend came along the path with some of their little charges in a special buggy, and stopped to speak to him. He misses this nursery, which he liked very much, and it's hard for him to understand the explanation that he's now too old to be there, so he looked very wistful as he gazed at the nursery buggy and waved goodbye to the staff, and R, watching him, looked positively tragic.

Luckily B was distracted by noticing the remains of one of the trees that came down in the recent storms, and after he'd explained it to me very seriously - "Tree fell down. In a storm. Men came an' cut it up an' took it away an' i's all gone now." - we then had check all the nearby trees: "This one's fallen down. Is all cut up. Tha' one's fine. Is still up. Tha' one's fine. Tha' one's all gone, look." The tree inventory and discussion ended when we accidentally disturbed the Red Admiral, and had to track it to rest so that B could get a good look at it. This prompted us to talk about our recent visit to the butterfly farm in Stratford, and the Boy said yes, he had enjoyed it and yes, he would like to go again some time. (What he actually said was "in a few minits", but his notion of the past and the future is quite newly acquired and still rather charmingly hazy.)

Back at the Boy's house we did some playing indoors and some playing out in the garden, and then it was time for R and me to leave. B announced that he was coming with us, and for two pins we'd have popped him in the car and brought him home - he really is great fun to be with.