Croome

The Boy Wonder is living a peripatetic existence at the moment. The builders who've spent the last few weeks constructing a roof extension on his house have now reached the point at which they need to knock through into the rest of the building, and there's so much mess and dust around that his parents were worried about him taking harm from it, so with the connivance of various friends and relatives he's been excluded from home for the past few days. R and I fully support this, because you can't be too careful with a small person, but we're conscious that being passed around like a parcel is pretty disruptive to a child who likes his routines, so when it was our turn to receive him today we anticipated that he might be somewhat out of kilter. In fact he was charming, happy and engaged for virtually the whole day, which I think says a lot about his essentially sunny nature.

To save us driving time, L brought him over to the Shire this morning, and we all met up at Croome, where Boy and several hundredweight of equipment were transferred from mother to grandparents. Then we all went for an early lunch, before L set off back to Wales and work.

B (surveying the café counter over the top of the queue, from his vantage point up in R's arms): "I want sausage."
J and R (harmonising): "What's the word?"
B: "Now."

After lunch and L's departure ("Ahhh," said the Boy, giving her a cursory cuddle. "Bye. Go away now."), R and I took him into the park to explore, and work off some energy. He was enchanted by the shrubbery, devising his own hide and seek game among the shrubs and trees and shrieking with delight when we crept up on him, and (like countless children before him) very much enjoyed going into the hollow tree and pretending that it was his own little house. Best of all though was the Temple Greenhouse, which was thoroughly explored inside and out, and from which - after a good half hour of him chugging in and out through this large window, and up and down the steps - we only managed to get him to move on via the bribe of a babyccino and a cookie.

On our way out to the car park, after a thoroughly successful afternoon, B noticed an aeroplane parked outside the adjacent RAF Defford Museum, and asked to go and see it. It's hard to imagine how he perceived the connection between this large, static machine and the apparently tiny but noisy things that fly across the sky, but he was completely riveted by it, and the "ol' airp'ane" featured large in our later discussions of the things we'd done and seen at Croome.

I'm confident in predicting that this won't be our last family visit.