Things that have been taking up time

Daughter 2 came home to visit us this weekend. Daughter 1, Son-in-Law 1 and Grandson came to see her on Friday. Grandson was wearing his burglar outfit.

On Saturday Daughter 2, who is an organised person, decided to tackle the bedrooms that used to belong to Son and to Daughter 1. (My mum is now occupying Daughter 2's room.) Both rooms were somewhat full of the possessions of 1) Daughter 2, who didn't take all her stuff down to London when she left home and 2) Son, who didn't take all of his stuff to Perth when he did. She has now thrown some things away and packed her remaining possessions into cupboards. This was a great improvement, or at least it's an improvement unless you want to put anything else into the cupboards.

Interestingly - well, ok, not very interestingly, but startlingly - she found in these cupboards a box labelled in her handwriting "Nil china". This, above, is what was in the box. Now, Nil is the china which I decided to phase out in the summer because it kept acquiring chips. As I said at the time, I supplemented the unchipped pieces with other blue and white china bought with money donated by colleagues when I retired.

Where did this extra Nil china come from - apart from an upstairs cupboard? Well, presumably I bought it. Some of it had "20% off" stickers on it, so I suppose I snapped it up as a bargain to use to replace, in due course, the Nil china that would chip in the future. And I imagine I must have staggered home with it and it seems most unlikely that I didn't mention it to Mr Life. And Daughter 2 must have labelled it and put it neatly away for future use. And none of us remembers this.

Or... we can all persuade ourselves that we do. Vaguely.

Too much on our minds, that's the problem. Minds on higher things. You think?

I will not need any more china for the rest of my life. I must bear this in mind.

Inspired by Daughter 2, Mr Life nobly decided to have a purge of some archives. Here he is at the discouraging stage of the clearout. It improved later.

On Sunday, Daughter 1, Son-in-Law 1 and Grandson came again. Here is Daughter 1 taking advantage of having doting relations cooing over the baby. She appeared to be knitting a shawl made out of cobwebs. Clearly her life isn't difficult enough as it is.

Daughter 2 and SIL 1 posed obligingly.

Grandson had a little nap.

Then he woke up. This time, he'd been dressed as an Edwardian chap about to go for a swim. Oh, how delicious he is.

Somewhat to my horror, SIL 1 claims that his entire family reads my blog (to see pictures of Grandson). I'm not sure if this is true - he tends to pull my leg. However, if it is, hello very-nice-in-laws! Sorry that you had to wade through plates to get to the baby.