This morning, leaving my wife to deal with the house, I went on a hike with a friend of ours, her son and our two daughters, assuming we’d be back well in time for a birthday party this afternoon.
Sadly we didn’t budget travel or hiking time properly (it was a bad idea to go to somewhere 90 minutes drive away) but the kids climbed up a decent sized hill, explored the entry to an abandoned mine, and then raced home again.
What I hadn’t realised until my friend noticed was how much my children ask me questions, and ask for more detail about things. Today it was opiate addiction cycles, indigestion and kidney stones, last time it was structural inequality and approaches to policing. We’ll be onto mathematics again soon, I hope, where I have more confidence in what I talk about.
My legs were in agony, which I realised afterwards was due to all that trampolining yesterday. Anyway, we returned and my wife had turned the house back into something liveable: we can sit on the sofa and have an unobstructed view of … the wall. Hey, it’s better than just having shelves and stuff piled everywhere.
Slowly we’re working out what the house will end up looking like. Neighbours have been very helpful with suggestions about where else a wall might be added or subtracted, but the real conversation will be with our contractor next week. And we need a good interior architect to tell us what colour and materials everything should be. It’s … complicated.