Sunday

We spend a good part of the day hands buried deeply in clumps of dust and dirt. Such a pretty day, too -- with an abundance of sunshine and not unreasonable October temperatures. And here we are, sorting through grime.

The day started well -- breakfast, delicious and delightful, leisurely, with stories and smiles and a perfect mug of coffee for me...





And after, Ed set the robot to work on vacuuming the big rooms. I took out the big vacuum cleaner to work around Snowdrop's playroom.

It's a tricky place to keep clean: all those Lego pieces! Tiny flowers, utensils, a wee crown for a tiny Frozen princess. I make sure all those wee items are on the mat, out of the vacuum's reach. But somehow I get ambitious and I get too close and before I know it -- woosh! in goes the princess crown. Sucked right up, into the dust bag.

That bag is near full. And if you've ever been in this pickle, you'll know that when you suck something in, it doesn't stay near the entrance. It somehow manages to fly into the very bowls of the dust bag.

Snowdrop is pretty easy going about lost items. When I start to look for a missing piece, she'll say -- don't worry, Gaga, it'll turn up. But the princess crown -- well, it's essential. Without it, the plastic figure is like Clark Kent without his costume. We've lost it before and she did not say then "don't worry Gaga." She was ever hoping that I would find it and when I did, she was delighted.

I dumped several months' worth of soot and grime on the mud room floor. And I did not find it. Ed offered to help. We carried all that dirt onto the picnic table outside, because working on it inside had been insanely dirty: everything in the mudroom is now covered with dust.

An hour later we give up.

Ed offers to make a replacement out of wood. I assure him that the item is too small -- about half the size of my pinky nail. He has another idea: he logs onto EBay and sure enough, we find a Lego mini character that sports a crown. Close enough! $3.50 later, we are done.

There are lessons in this story -- one of them having to do with the ease of buying replacements, another about searching for a grain of sand on a beach, perhaps another about how good it is to have a partner who will stop what he's doing to look for a tiny piece of plastic for a little girl. In the end, I keep coming back to this one: the sweetest part of the afternoon had to be our joint search for that wee crown at the picnic table in today's glorious sunshine. I kept thinking that there are worse ways to spend a gorgeous Sunday.






In the evening, the young family comes for dinner. 

(Sparrow, with parents...)











(Snowdrop, with a story...)






(Dinner, now with just the five of us as Ed had to pop out for a business meeting.)





Clear skies, starlit night. They say the sun will be with us for a good part of the week. How lovely is that!