Three today

Today was Ellie’s third birthday. She was meant to be with Pistol Pete overnight, but because of a suspected case of COVID-19 at the prison, he is now ensuring that he is isolating from Ellie. We did, however, ensure that we had several video calls with him throughout the day, and he even read Ellie a bedtime story over the video, at the end of the day.

We had kept the blinds closed so that she couldn’t see into the Orangery when she first came down. It finally dawned on her that the blinds were closed and when she pushed them aside, mayhem ensured.

She saw the balloons, the banner, the wigwam, the pile of presents, and the cards. She was so excited. We had a couple of hours of frantic excitement, particularly when Urban-Cub brought in her pink bicycle from the garage. We ended up going up and down the hall and round the kitchen. The pedals still seem a bit of a mystery to her, but why worry when Mummy, Nana, or Bumpa can pull her around!

During the afternoon we set up a “Zoom” call with the families from Buckingham, and Cousteau-Cub and the Coventry Hobbit. The Gorse Fox used Apple's screen mirroring to throw the video up onto the big TV and we set all the participants up in a gallery view so that we could see everyone at once. Cousteau-cub had a few problems at first, but when she changed from her laptop to her phone, it was fine. This worked very well, though Ellie became completely tongue-tied for the duration and just ran around.

It was a lovely day, but though she went to bed without a murmur, she did disturb a few times early the night.