Here’s part two of the weekend.
The nap I took on Saturday afternoon, while blissful and necessary at the time, fudged my sleep schedule enough so that I was wide awake at midnight. Still, we awoke relatively stress-free on Sunday, and packed the car in the gorgeous sunshine to take a trip to Rowan Tree Farm, AKA the Coalition Stronghold, to help Janice build the chicken coop for her two dozen rapidly growing baby chicks. Who really don’t qualify as chicks any longer, but they’re not quite chickens yet, so we started calling them baby chickens. The boy called the coop a birdhouse all day, and when we stopped correcting him he actually called it a chicken house.
We got there just before ten. It was a fabulously gorgeous day and I wish I hadn’t been so drained by the four previous days’ events. I had a really tough time trailing after the boy, who wanted to be everywhere. Wandering around after him wasn’t so bad, really; it was trying to explain to him that I couldn’t play with him the way he wanted me to that was the difficult part. Add to that the fact that he didn’t nap, which he never does when we’re there, and we had a few unhappy moments as the day progressed. He desperately wanted to help build the henhouse, but HRH and Jan were carrying around cinder blocks, bags of gravel, 4 x 8′ pieces of plywood and 2x4s, and power tools were being used, so keeping him out of the way was a challenge. Thank goodness for Carter, the resident husky/collie mix, who loves people and loves to play. His leg is out of his cast/splint and while he limps when he walks, he runs at top speed like there’s nothing wrong (other than sometimes leaving a step with the bad leg out of the gallop entirely). Once we’d explained to the boy that the dog loved to play best by running at a person and slaloming out of the way at the last minute, made necessary after the boy tried to dodge and ended up stepping into the dog’s flight path (which resulted in the child being tossed into the air and rolling a few times in the long grass) Sparky spent a lot of the day running at/away from the dog through shoulder-height grass, giggling. If they weren’t running together they were sitting on the ground in the shade, giving one another kisses and hugs, or hiding form one another in the tall grass. He did get to help a bit with the building process, handing HRH screws when needed, and pretending to saw wood or use the screwdrivers from his set of toy tools which he had brought along. There was a lot of movement in and out of the house between the great outdoors and all its attractions, and the first season of the Muppet Show on DVD and the few toys he’d brought.
At the end of the day we had to eat and run, as it was coming up on nine o’clock. The hours of daylight had yielded a very solid henhouse with a roof and a window that basically only needed the door hung and the insulation put in, plus the panelling installed to cover the insulation (because chickens are chickens, and see nothing wrong with eating insulation), plus a couple more finishing touches. The boy discovered that he loves rye bread, and a certain pita chip made by someone at the local farmers’ market flavoured with thyme. He actually asked if he could be buckled into the car with a blanket, so we knew he was exhausted and thinking of going home, despite telling me earlier that he never wanted to leave t! and Janice’s house. Before we left they presented us with a lovely gift of a framed photograph, taken by t! the last summer at their housewarming, of the three of us walking through the back fields toward the pond. The boy was presented with a silver five-dollar coin, and told that it was treasure. As he was very tired and unfocused, HRH and I were more excited about it than he was.
We buckled him in and away we went into the night. When we stopped for gas we covered him up with the requested blanket, and he was asleep before we hit the highway. I dozed a lot of the way myself. We slid him into bed around ten-thirty, and he was tired enough not to whine or delay or ask someone to cuddle him for a bit. Washing the collected grime off him can wait till tonight.
In retrospect, it might have made more sense for HRH to head out there alone. But that would have deprived the boy of romping with the dog, seeing the baby chickens, and I wouldn’t have seen t! and Jan, which I so rarely get to do these days. And I did get to spend a lot of time outside on a glorious day.
The kids’ party was a success. (Or if it wasn’t, eleven kids and their companion adults did a very good job of conspiring to present a unified false front.) So successful, in fact, that we completely dropped the planned craft from the schedule and sent the kids home with their choice of wooden object to paint, along with their superhero balloon from the balloon bouquet HRH went out and picked up this morning. (He also picked up a Superman t-shirt for the boy, who had reluctantly agreed to wear his Spiderman shirt but argued earnestly that Spiderman wasn’t really a superhero. “Are you kidding?” said HRH. “Superman is super-strong, but Spiderman’s much faster than he is.” He came home with the shirt as a surprise, though, and the boy was thrilled to bits with it.)
– Proofed and handed in my freelance assignment
Today is kind of a mess. There needs to be a cake and two batches of cookies baked, as well as our regular bread. HRH is doing most of the grocery shopping after dropping the boy off with the caregiver, while I finish up the latest assignment and hand it in. We need to head out to the craft store in the east end to pick up supplies for the crafty part of tomorrow’s party; party decorations need to be picked up as well, at a different store. We need to hit a particular grocery store for a couple of items not available at our regular grocery store, and another speciality store to pick up gel colouring for 
Last night: After an extra-long bedtime snuggle, I tucked the boy in and kissed his forehead. He held his arms up for one last hug. I obliged, and he gently nuzzled my cheek with his and whispered, “Thank you for my happy birthday.” My heart just about exploded.
Okay, here we go.