Blackberries

The Fish Man appeared at the door this evening, thoroughly confused and wondering if he had the right house. Of course he did. We're just house-sitting. So he tempted me with all sorts of fish things but it was the steak and guinness parcels that got me. £100 worse off but with three boxes of frozen goodies to stuff in the freezer later, he disappeared and I could get the boys their tea.

I had to take two bags of blackberries out of the freezer to fit the new stuff in (even taken out of the boxes, and bagged and labelled) so have been forced to spend my evening making blackberry cordial!! It's rather good, half and half with milk. A blackberry milkshake. Yummy.

Today our mission was shopping.

As mum had left me with a mission to find a particular piece of table covering from a particular shop, we decided to go to John Lewis.

By the time we'd cleared up the breakfast things, played with playdough, had a snack, cleaned up the snack, written the shopping list and got ready, it was lunchtime so we went straight to the cafe. Where I'd arranged to meet Gran, much to the delight of the boys!

Then Bear fell off his chair and bumped his chin. His relationship with chairs is pretty dreadful at the moment, he's fallen off so many chairs in the past few weeks. Some of them are almost comical the way they happen, but it always hurts him and he's always taken by surprise.

He's not fallen off exactly the same way twice, though. I'll give him that.

So he wanted to nurse, and then I looked down and he'd only gone and fallen asleep.

The one time in the past I don't know how many weeks that I've come out without a wrap and he goes and falls asleep on me in the middle of a noisy restaurant.

The haberdashery department were brilliant though. I went to try and get a fairly cheap piece of cloth that I could use as an emergency wrap but after deciding that even plain bleached calico was WAY too expensive for an emergency wrap just to save my arms from falling off they realised what I wanted it for and offered to go and get a pushchair from Customer Services for me! Hurrah for John Lewis and their customer service. They are awesome. (All they need now is wraps or proper baby carriers on loan as well as pushchairs and they will officially be my Most Favourite Store Ever!) I was taken to another department and found a chair where I could wait with Bear (Bean was looking at toys with Gran by this point) and the staff didn't bat an eyelid as I sat and nursed my sleeping toddler. Nor did they complain when he cried for mama and boobies when I tried to transfer him into the pushchair (it was worth a shot!). And they even took the pushchair back to customer services for me when it became apparent that he would rather wake up than go in the pushchair....! They really were a lovely lot today. And I was hugely grateful, because a problematic situation was made eminently more bearable because of their helpfulness. (And also because Gran was there, entertaining Bean!)

So we were there nearly three hours, once Bear had woken up and we'd found the tablecovering that Mum wanted and gone and done the grocery shopping that we also needed to do.

I enjoy taking the boys shopping with me, I'm learning to go with it and use the experience for them to learn things; but sometimes it's just... well... three hours. Argh! So we missed a playdate. But got some fish instead.

What a day.