Reappearance

It was over a week since I'd last seen a Hummingbird Hawkmoth, and I'd begun to wonder if their season had finished early, as it has with many insects this summer, so I was very pleased to spot this one on the red valerian at lunch time today. "Look!" I said to the Boy Wonder "Isn't it amazing! Can you see how fast those wings are beating, and its long, long tongue?" "Mmmm," he said, disappearing back into the house to resume the far more interesting task of building a tiny walking robot with Granddad. I confess that after a long and busy morning my reaction to this dismissal wasn't disappointment, so much as Praise be! Five minutes on my own with the camera!

Looking back on the day now, I'm not entirely sure how we fit as much in as we did - especially given that I declined to get up until 7.30am, which is mid-morning as far as the Boy is concerned. As well as completing R's little robot, the two of them built a Lego road roller (a task that had me awarding R a virtual Nobel Prize for Patience), and spent a while watching child-appropriate videos on YouTube. And out in the garden there was swinging (obligatory), and watering of the patio pots - an activity I don't always allow because it ends up in virtually everything on the premises being watered except the plants that need it, but which is therefore especially prized. 

After the Boy had finished his water play, I got out a squeegee to clear as much water as I could from the kitchen and conservatory windows, and he was there in a flash: "Give it to me! I can do that!" Which he could, it turned out - after a fashion, at least - and of course, squeegeeing a window is a satisfying thing to do, so he worked on the task for quite a while, only stopping in the end because he needed to let me know that he was quite wet actually, and getting cold. In fact, he was drenched to the skin - every stitch he was wearing ended up in the dryer, except his wellingtons, which I emptied out and set to dry on the patio table.

After lunch we got in the car and went to the supermarket in Stratford, detoured briefly into Costa to top up my caffeine and B's sugar levels, and then went to the big playground at Stratford rec'. Where I think we'd still be now, all attempts to persuade him out of there having fallen on stone-deaf ears, if I hadn't eventually pointed out that it was now virtually dinner time, and if he wanted me to cook him some chicken nuggets we were going to have to go and get in the car Right Now, Please, otherwise we'd all be eating leftovers. 

Back at home I made dinner, while R and the Boy looked at a book we'd bought him about the way various things work in the natural world. This was a partial success, though he found some of the explanations - for example, about why and how volcanoes erupt - a bit too shallow. Then, having learned about hurricanes, he said that he wanted to see a film of one - but after viewing the first video R found on his phone, his instant reaction was, "That's not a hurricane - it's a tornado!" After quickly researching the difference between the two, R rolled his eyes at me over the top of the Boy's head, and said, "Actually, he's quite right - it is a tornado." Who says Tom and Jerry & the Wizard of Oz isn't educational?

By the time we'd navigated the usual riotous bath-time routine and I'd read five (or was it six?) bedtime stories, I was pretty much ready for bed myself. But I levered myself upright and tottered back downstairs, with a view to sharing a little non-challenging, adult-to-adult conversation with R, over the small bucket of red wine he already had lined up and waiting for me. After reminding each other of some of the funniest (and least funny) incidents of the day, and the best Boy pronouncements, we decided that on balance we'd all had a pretty good time.