Duck!

"More bed, Gandad!"

R and I went to Cardiff today, to see our Best Boy for the first time in eleven days (our co-grandparents having kindly volunteered to do an extra day with him last week, while R and I lay supine on the kitchen floor with cold cloths on our foreheads, recovering from the mammoth Mummy Birthday Weekend).

He was absolutely charming all day, and seemed very pleased to see us - though, not, obviously, nearly as pleased as we were to be with him. His speech has come on dramatically in the past week and a half, but sadly, not having been around him during the vocabulary explosion, we didn't have our ears in properly, and he frequently had to explain things to us several times before we grasped them. R is now "Gandad Wichud", and I am "Gamma Djiwl", though sometimes it's "Dandad" and "Damma". From time to time he comes out with "Gamma Wichud", which is slightly perplexing, but given his sense of humour it's entirely possible that this is a joke rather than a mistake.

It was a vile day in the Principality, but after lunch we took B out anyway, and squelched around our normal circuit of the two local parks. This is the further one, which has the Swedish café with the cardamom buns ("Cake!"), but also a pond and about twenty mallard, for whom I'd finally remembered today to take some bread. B had a great time throwing chunks at them and watching them eat, as you can probably see from the smiley curve of his cheek in this photo. Ever since he first began speaking, ducks have been called "'A, 'a!" - this being the noise they make - but today they were very precisely named as "Duck!"

At the start of the feeding process most of the birds were gathered on the piece of grass to the left of shot, which is surrounded by a fence that protects them from dogs, children, and other annoyances. But once they realised that there was food on offer they began to step between the railings and out onto the path, and in short order the Boy was surrounded by noisy ducks, clamouring for his bread. To my surprise he was fine with this, though he was startled when one of the drakes jumped at him and snatched a piece from his hand. But R treated it as a funny incident, and after a momentary pause for thought, B decided to do the same.

By the time all the bread was gone it was pouring down, and we were all so damp that even B was happy to head for home. We rapidly tucked him under pram duvet and rain cover, but back at home when I lifted him out of the pram and set him down, he pointed at his trousers and said, "Wet yegs!" in a tone I couldn't help but feel was slightly accusatory. He wasn't wrong though - his yegs were definitely wet. Luckily for him - unlike myself - a dry pair of trousers was able to be sourced and applied in short order. I'm hoping to have dry yegs again by tomorrow, or by Christmas Eve at the latest.