Buying, bussing, babies

No, not "Buying bussing babies" - I went to the shops by bus with Linnea.

And she's not for sale, and she doesn't do kisses unless being half-eaten by a giant slug is your idea of a nice social kiss. An enthusiastic giant slug.

As an expedition, it went well enough. The bus goes hourly to the big supermarket, so when Linnea went down for her nap, I trotted off to the bus-stop. A nice man in a shiny car turned into the road in front of me, without indicating, holding his phone between his ear and his shoulder. He did have that hand on the wheel; I don't know where his other hand was. Then I got to the pedestrian crossing. Green for people! Hurrah! Except for the double decker bus obscuring the bit I needed to walk in. Not enough space around it to wiggle the buggy through the traffic, either. So my bus sailed by.

I went back an hour later and got the bus. The driver stopped at two public toilets en route, with commentary, and swore at something only he could see quite a lot. It was a bumpy ride. Linnea was biting her fingers and I got to wondering - if she bit one off, would they be able to make her sick it back up again and stitch it back? Or would she just be fingerless forever? Cheerful thoughts like these are one of the many joys of motherhood, I believe, though it's also possible that PTSD makes them a bit more surreal than whatever we're objectively calling "normal" this week.

The huge multi-storey Boots wasn't, after all - it was a huge, multi-storey building with a tiny Boots in it and no indication of what the rest is used for. But I got Linnea some boys' socks quite cheaply (you can tell they're boys' socks - they're not pink, and so the label says "Boy's Socks"). But we had a pleasant lunch in the coffee shop in Sainsbury's and I replaced my "Bag for Life" with one less degenerate. Although the old one had sunny happy sunflowers on it, and this one has uniform, unnatural-looking oranges. I don't even like oranges very much. Stringy.

On the way home I saw one of the Conservative Election Posters - "Imagine 5 more years of it" over a tabloid headline of "Killer infections in hospital double since Labour" or something similar. At the bottom, it said "Are you smoking what we're smoking?"

I called Rob to check that it was, in fact, a very careful vandal who got the fonts to match, and not a sudden alarming sense-of-humour development on the part of the Tories. We think it was the former.

While Linnea was playing in the garden today, I got a lot of ivy hacked down, and dandelions weeded. I really want a little hand-held flamethrower for the weeds on the patio. Perhaps we'll buy one tomorrow.

I forgot to mention...

This morning, I spent almsot half an hour lying on the grass, pushing Linnea's swing with my feet, or sitting up letting her kick me in the chest as she swung forwards.

It was glorious.