Today was a staying-at-home-and-doing-laundry kind of a day. E had put up my retractable clothesline under cover on the deck last night, so I filled that up, and the racks, and half the Hills Hoist. Hurrah for clean socks! H had a bit of a nap, from around 11ish, but was awake for the rest of the time and spent most of it eating. He’s a definite fan of this food business, that boy. K pottered, played in the garden, watched a couple of Playschool episodes, and brought me books to read. I listed some more books on JB and made another $50. I felt inspired to cook, so tried a newly tweaked bread recipe in the machine, and started making a meat and vege pie at about 4. K got very grumpy with me because I had said I was making a cake, then got involved in making bread and pie instead, so she flumped off to watch TV.

B came home a bit before 5ish, talked about wanting to do music lessons, and then exploded when I asked what she was planning to stop doing so we could pay for them *sigh* Then she got distracted with wanting to arrange something with Caitlin so she could get to sports next term. Which is affordable (it’s only about $30-40 per term) but awkward given that it’s at the other side of town. It may be possible to arrange for her to come back on the bus with E; we shall see… She had a long chat with Caitlin, including looking up songs on Youtube on my computer, then exploded when she realised that she’d missed the first half of Rollercoaster and the DVD player had been left on so had not recorded it… There were more explosions, which escalated to bullying K and screaming in H’s ear, at which I exploded also, and it all went Very Nasty for a moment or two. Then B complained that somehow it was because she kept trying to talk to me and I wasn’t listening…um? Try turning off the TV, putting down the phone, and getting away from the ‘puter, and then tell me that 😉 Fortunately E came home at that point, having forgotten that he should have been at a Baronial meeting, so there was a bit of a circuit-breaker.

E took the girls off to take B to her first Scouts meeting, and I put H to bed. B is in the process of moving up from Cubs to Scouts, which means she’ll now be going to both Wednesday and Friday meetings for a while. When they got back, E was reading to K in her bed when they heard the rat trap go off, but upon investigation there were no dead rodents and no peanut butter either, so who knows…? He reset it and put it back up again, and hopefully we will see some success with this method and then not have to escalate it to poison. I went out to collect B at 9, as K was still having stories and songs, and she seemed to have had a lot of rather rough fun, and to have at least one friend there. It will be interesting to see how co-ed scout groups go as the kids get a little bit older, really… We got back in time for B to watch some of The Gruen Transfer, then a recording of Dr Who and Dr Who Confidential, then off to bed!