Glad to sit down

I do not feel the need to have an opinion about whether a woman past her natural childbearing years should conceive a baby with medical assistance. But blimey, it wouldn't be for me. Two days with Squiffany and I ache in back and hip and I'm not even arthritic. We have had a most enjoyable couple of days but I'm not sure I'd be up to it full time.

We went to Beccles this morning and shopped - fun things for her and useful ones for me. I meant to take her to the local very nice (albeit rather expensive) café, but as it can be quite crowded there I decided to take the pushchair and bags back to the car first. I couldn't fold up the pushchair. The baby started to cry. I got agitated. I had to ring Al and be talked through the knack of pushchair folding. I've been quite disappointed that the design of babies' hardware, as it were, has become trickier and more annoying to operate in the last couple of decades. So many things are really good; non-spill lidded beakers, easy to fasten clothes, real nappies - the modern ones are really excellent and the pants too, goodness, when I think of the hoo-haa of folding those bloody things, and hoping the pin didn't come undone and skewer the baby and knowing that it would leak because it simply didn't all fit in the plastic pants; that you would think that being able to disassemble a pushchair one-handed, put car seats in and out of cars, fasten the baby in simply even if it squirmed, would have been thought about by now.

We did get to the café in the end; she had apple juice, I had coffee and we shared a toasted teacake which was extremely good. She was very happy. She rarely is offered juice, though she eats lots of fruit; she just has water, plus milk night and morning, so it was a treat. And she really likes her toy tractor and shows it to the dog and goes vroom vroom as she pushes it along the table.

I hope we don't get gales as the forecasters suggest. The wisteria is just coming out and it should look wonderful by next week. Though if we do get the extremes of weather they were muttering about a couple of days ago, I suppose I'll be more worried about the roof than whether flowers are spoilt.