Another late night last night. H and I got up around 8am, but K slept in longer, as did MrBat (or at least, attempted to). I think K was playing online games in the morning for a while. I don’t know what else they did, because I went out at midday for a women’s circle/crafty afternoon and Mr Bat attempted to amuse kidlets while still suffering from his week-long attack of the Pernicious Lurgi.

I got home around sixish and Mr Bat retreated to work on his projects and I small-wrangled. H wanted some concentrated attention, and was also very excited about his discovery that he is almost tall enough to turn light switches on and off, so he turned all the lights off then we sat in the living room in the dark and watched the fire and had cuddles and told stories to each other. Because I am crap at telling stories but my children have recently become convinced of my genius and started demanding story-story-story on a regular basis, I am developing my collaborative story-telling game where I start them off, get to a suitable cliffhanger, and let them keep going. Tis lots of fun! In H’s stories, things tend to get eaten by dragons and big bad wolves, TheEnd, but K is getting into spinning long convoluted tales. My favourite this afternoon involved a family of carrots who met a fairy godmother and asked to be turned into people so that they wouldn’t get eaten…

After dinner and more cuddles and books, H went and listened to music with Mr Bat until he fell asleep, and K and I read some more of The Long Winter. When Almanzo gets back from his epic trip with frozen feet, we talked about frostbite, circulation, gangrene etc. She wasn’t particularly tired when we finished but it was very late and I wanted some peace and quiet, so I suggested she could take a torch into bed with her and look at books or play quietly with her toys until she was tired. She liked that idea. Mr Bat came in to sing songs after a little while, then left her playing with her torch, and she stayed happily in bed with it until she went to sleep. Very painless: will try again if needed.