Still kind of lockdown, week 21, seeing offspring

Littlest was sitting at the piano, singing "Twinkle twinkle, little star" and accompanying herself (with two fingers, and not with the right notes but with a nice regular beat). I'm not taking this as a sign that she's going to be a performer like her father. I'm sure this means that she's going to be a fairly musical corporate lawyer. 

I took her to the playpark. "I looking out to sea."

She discovered that Playdoh cuts nicely with scissors. Who knew?

After one and a half days back at school, Biggest Granddaughter came home with a cough. She's otherwise perfectly well as far as anyone can tell. She's prone to coughs whenever she gets a cold, but nonetheless we all realised that it might just be The Virus, since she's been down south on a visit to her other grandparents. Not that there's much of the virus down there or here at the moment, but to be on the safe side, her parents nobly took her for a test on Saturday morning (results in a few days). So they then came round, but we stayed out in the garden. Littlest Granddaughter loves playing with her big cousins, or - to be more accurate - following them around, copying what they're doing and asking them lots of questions. They're remarkably patient.

At one point Biggest Granddaughter found herself a chair, a rug (yes, Scotland in the summer) and her Beano annual for a nice quiet read. (The Beano is a comic.) Littlest stood beside her. "I want to see. What he doing? Why dat boy chasing dat dog? Why dat man got a big nose? Why he looking cross?.. ." Poor Biggest.

Here is Littlest today, looking at "Me and My Cat?" by Satoshi Kitamura. It's a very funny story about a boy who gets turned into his cat, while his cat gets turned into him - all by mistake, by a witch who came to the wrong house. I greatly recommend it for children of maybe four and upwards, but I'm quite glad she didn't ask me to explain it.

And now she and Daughter 2 are back in London. It was so lovely to have them for a whole fortnight - when will that ever happen again? - but the house is very empty without them. I hope we'll see them again before too long, but in these uncertain times... who can say?

Sigh. I do hope Biggest's test is negative or else the extended family will all have to quarantine... at best. We're actually all fairly sure it's just a cold, but I don't know that we're basing our diagnosis on anything except that the virus seems unlikely, she seems well and it would be terribly inconvenient if she did have it. But I still think she doesn't. Strange days, though... .