I’m relishing having a child (Linus) who is old enough to enjoy being read to.

In the past I’ve read him a couple of Enid Blyton’s ‘Faraway Tree’ books; Nana has read him Roald Dahl’s ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’; and we’ve all read him bits and pieces of Dahl’s ‘The Twits’.

Our latest book that we’ve just finished has been Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, and our current one (from the library) is Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’, as recommended by some home-educating friends of mine.

Linus’s attention span is surprising and delightful, and I only wish I had more time to read with him without two little girls – whom I love dearly, of course! – around to distract and interrupt us!

I remember my dad reading random chapters from ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ to us when we were little I look forward to sharing such diverse and adult pleasures with Linus.

Bug = 4 years 8 months
Bub = 2 years 10 months
Bud = 1 year 2 months

Today Linus and I went fishing for the first time.  This is something that we’ve been planning to do for a very long time but we haven’t managed to get around to it.  We started off by going to see Andy and Dominic where we found some worms in their compost pile.  Then we went down to the harbour with our fishing rods and tried to catch some fish. We were there for about three hours and didn’t catch any fish at all.  That was a bit disappointing but everyone was very keen to do it again some time soon.

One exciting thing that did happen was that a man who was fishing near us caught a shag on his fishing line.  He had to reel it in and pull it out of the water so that he could unhook it, but the shag had different ideas and was trying to bite him instead.  It was funny but it was also a bit sad for the shag.  Everyone including the shag was OK in the end.

Next time we will go fishing and we must catch a fish (says Linus) and we’ll do that by taking some bait and other things with us, especially considering all we had was two rods and a swivel!

At the moment, Zoe has two current obsessions (apart from booby!):

- the “Ta?” game… back and forth and back and forth for ages;

and

- emptying things (like Mummy’s handbag) then packing all the items back in.

She is less obsessed with sleep, going through a very restless phase. I’ll put it down to our recent trip away.