We had a lovely time with Arthur and Curtana yesterday. Liam was a little reserved at first when Arthur arrived and dove straight into the toys, but by lunchtime they were passing food back and forth.

Together they managed to go through the house like a miniature tag-team hurricane, pulling every single toy out and most of the books down from the shelves. I’ve never seen every toy on the floor before. It’s rather frightening. Liam doesn’t have a lot of toys, but the toys he does have are sets of things — two sets of blocks, two sets of balls, stacking cups, two Fisher Price vehicles with their attending Little People — so when they’re all out of their storage they spread out. Plus there were the stuffed animals that we keep trying to stop people from giving to us. (Actually, people have generally listened to our plea for no stuffies, but Liam keeps adding some of my stuffed animals to his, like my fox and my Eeyore and my puffin, so his collection is expanding and mine is shrinking.)

In general, Liam only has three or four things out at a time. But all in all, two small baskets and two shelves in the living room made a scary tempest of toys. Time to go through those two little baskets and condense them into one, I think, and get rid of the toys he played with when he was younger and doesn’t really play with any more.

At some point I’d like to actually talk to Curtana in a grown-up fashion — about the things she’s studied, what she’s worked on, gaming and reading and so forth — but I was absolutely dead by the time they arrived yesterday, thanks to washing the kitchen floor three times in a row (once because it was kind of sticky, once because Liam had managed to snag the tea cosy and pull it down… along with the teapot full of cold tea inside it, and once because he managed to knock a kitchen chair into the cats’ water and food dishes and spilled them everywhere), and I was fascinated by how the two boys played in different ways, and interacted. The teaming up to trap the cat in the bedroom, beaming at her from either side of the bed, was particularly amusing.

I’ve got a lot of work to do today to cover what didn’t get done on Wednesday. I’m at an odd point with this MS: I’ve got about sixty percent down in each chapter (yes, yes, except for Chapter Two, that gets done last; and the chapter about dealing with grief, which I don’t particularly want to deal with myself so I keep skipping over the two pages of it that exist), and now I have to try to see what isn’t there yet and ought to be. Unlike the spellcraft book, when I wake up in the morning I don’t already have an idea of what topic I want to work on that day, so when I sit down to work I scan through the file to see what catches my interest. There have been an awful lot of days recently where nothing does. Not because it’s uninteresting, simply because I don’t actively feel like working on the topics in this book just now. (I secretly want to be writing a Regency comedy of manners. No plot, no clearly defined characters, and certainly no time. It’s simply what I want to be writing for some reason.)

I may just roll a d10 and work on the chapter whose number randomly comes up.