Leaving Las Vegas

Sharon will shortly be leaving Las Vegas, hopefully not dressed in an Elvis jump suit and parachuting from a plane. We've all missed her this week. She's been away on a Pampered Chef Exec Conference at Caesar's Palace and it sounds like it has been fairly intense. Throw in the jet lag and missing her boys and it makes for a hard week. I've had Michael over to help with the logistics of multiple drop-offs and pick-ups which has meant I've only had to take one afternoon off, for swimming lessons on Tuesday. However, as the sole point man it's been hard work preparing the never-ending smorgasboard of food consumed in the Wallace household and dealing with the nocturnal visits and shouts.

We stopped lifting Finn just before his birthday and he's been doing well - until last night. Hopefully that was just a blip. Angus has been regularly waking well before 0700 and usually triggering Rowan to get up and start to make noise and fuss, especially when his more diligent big brothers send him back to bed because it;s not wake-up time. Rowan reacts to this with his usual good grace; the keening cry and head thrown back and shouting and stomping just to make sure that anyone who had somehow not been disturbed by him and Angus was well and truly awake.

By and large the boys have been fine. Rowan is delighted to have his Papa here, picking him up from nursery, and Finn has just been in his usual, antagonistic, heedless mood. Sean, being that bit older now, has felt his mother's absence a bit more than the others. Angus has been a bit cranky going to bed the last couple of nights but that may be due to him coming down with another cold.

Tonight, as I went to retrieve Angus's baby-grow while he bathed, I was aware of his voice sounding different to what it should. The acoustics were wrong. And there he was, strolling past me in the hall. He had somehow got himself out of the bath. I certainly hadn't heard any clatter and there didn't appear to be excess water on the floor, so how he made a relatively graceful exit from the bath remains a mystery. No-one lifted him out, that's for sure. One of his nappies yesterday had a plum stone in it. That was a consequence of Michael getting to him too late the day before in the garden, before Angus had wolfed down one of the plums off the tree. He's also a devil for throwing things at the moment. Sean had his glasses whipped off and hurled across the living room earlier in the week. And last week I had the sand from my sandal tipped on me as I lay in bed in the morning. He has all the makings of a tyke, that lad.