out of the chaos...

Will our lives ever be the same again? I had surrendered to the chaos of living without the living room, but I had to get the hoover out to the kitchen floor when a pile of rice crispies was followed by half a packet of sunflower seeds. Brendan spent some of his birthday doing more floor sanding with a new orbital sander he got on a successful mission to B&Q yesterday, where he also got floor wax, a new swing seat, and, elswhere, got the bits to fix Jem's new bike, kindly given to us by E & J.
Allie is here playing ith some of the playmobil characters that Brendan got when he visited his old Uni friends in Sheff. I have thusfar resited all playmobil, apart from pirates for the ELC pirate ship (which has horrible pirates). This partly stems from long ago when I worked at a toy library and the Playmobil ambulance kept coming back with less and less of the bits as no-one could find or even remember what the bits were. Also, the Steiner philosophy that toys that are more simple help to develop the imagination more, and should be made from natural materials. Well, they are fairly simple, I suppose, but still plastic, and there is an ambulance! O well, my attempts at restricting their toys to what I consider suitable are always being undermined! And we already have too much stuff! Still, it was nice of them to think of us, and they have really enjoyed playing with them. (She hastily adds, remembering that he also showed his friends my blog!)
At least we had managed to make a birthday cake. And then I took Jem and Fugs on a foraging mission for barbeque and bonfire stuff. Amazing what you can get in the off-licence, which is about the only shop open late on Sunday afternoon. So, after a slightly stressful bit of organising, we managed to have a reallly nice barbeque, followed by birthday cake and then made a firepit in the middle of the garden. (This was part of B's birthday present: although he dug it himself, I got the stones!) We sat out until it started getting dark , and rained, although we stayed dry under the parasol.