Any Day Soon

For a small person who hasn't even entered the World yet, the new baby granddaughter is very much making her presence felt in the manner of causing several false alarms. She has been threatening to arrive for, oooh, a good couple of weeks now, even though she isn't due until 1st May. 

I have been having words. I've said, 'You are to wait until at least 21st April, until you are a Taurean baby. A Taurean baby will balance your little family very well indeed.' So at least she has sat tight until today, bless her! 

As a consequence of her little 'shall I, shan't I?' shenanigans, I have been on full Granny Alert ready to collect Kayleigh for when it all kicks off for real. This means having my mobile switched on all the time and by my side in easy reach which is a novelty for me as I am not a mobile phone type of person, and how these youngsters tote theirs around in a claw-like clutch all the time I neither know nor understand. Kayleigh has been preparing for big sisterhood by toting a doll around, mostly very carefully in 'carry a baby properly' mode, but sometimes in a more worrying, 'dangling upside-down by the neck/ leg/ arm' fashion. Grandpa Andy says. 'You aren't going to carry your new sister like that, are you?' and Kayleigh sighs, gives him a bit of a look and says, as wearily as a 4 year old can, 'Of course not, Grandpa.'

Kayleigh has fully discovered the joy of chickens. When she was a toddler, she liked the hens enormously, and would squat down amongst them, chatting away and trying to force cabbage leaves upon them. Then she went through a phase of liking chickens but only from a distance because she was convinced they were trying to rip the skin from her fingers and draw as much blood as possible a la vampire hen. They never did, of course,because (aside from Mrs Poo) our hens have always been a very gentle and peaceable bunch.

But now? Well, when Kayleigh visits it's, 'Do the chickens need feeding? I think they might be hungry. Shall we feed the chickens? Are there any eggs? Let's check for eggs. I think there might be eggs,' until we relent and troop up to the hens' end of the garden where Kayleigh marches about dispensing sunflower seeds and greens, collecting eggs and generally trying to organise Primrose and Daisy into what she regards as proper hen-like activities. She happily allows them to peck seeds from her bare hands, and is, I think, beginning to grasp that one hen = one egg per day and if Gran has already collected the eggs that day then there will not be any more to collect, despite her small child insistence there MAY have been some kind of egg miracle. 

So, new baby will be a Taurean, may possibly arrive very soon, or may not, because babies arrive when they want to. I continue to forget to remember to have my phone with me all the time, and thusly spend a lot of time thinking, 'Where did I leave my phone?' because until recently I have ALWAYS known where it has been which is switched off in the bottom of my bag. I have been officially identified as 'Person Safe To Collect Kayleigh From Nursery School.' Chris is looking forward to the baby arriving because he says he might then get a decent night of sleep (???) and Leane is looking forward to the baby arriving so she doesn't have to keep suffering all these uncomfortable false alarms. 

And Grandpa Andy? Well, aside from proving to be the BEST grandpa a child could ever wish for, he is calmly oblivious to all current baby-events and taking it all in his stride.

But then he is a Taurean, too. And that is what they (generally) are like.