Ingrid still insists on staying with me rather than going to preschool, and really is at her best behaviour almost all day long. It’s worked unexpectedly well.

She is starting to miss her friends, but as she pointed out herself, all but one of them are in a different group at preschool anyway, so she wouldn’t get to meet them much even if she did go there. I’ve decided to take her there anyway on Wednesday so I can go to playgroup with Adrian – bigger kids are not welcome there on baby days.

In the morning, a trip to the clinic for Adrian’s 5-month vaccinations and the inevitable weighing and measuring. (8.2 kg and 68.5 cm.) Then to the pharmacy to pick up a cortison cream for a patch of eczema he has, plus some cream against his cradle cap, which isn’t bothering us in and of itself, but it’s covering his eczema and making that hard to treat.

In the afternoon, grocery shopping and a visit to the library.

A contractor was scheduled to come here today to start put up scaffolding, so the builders can start working on the new roof. But this weekend we got the builders’ estimates for the remaining tasks. (We’ve been nagging at them since before Christmas about this. I guess paperwork and estimating isn’t their idea of fun.) And the roof came in at about twice their original back-of-the-envelope estimate, so we cancelled the scaffolding immediately. With the sums we’re now talking about, the new roof is not going to happen. Not because we don’t have the money but because it’s not worth it. As an investment, it would never pay for itself – we’d never get that money back if we had to sell the house. Had it been cheaper we could have done it anyway, just because we ourselves would be happier with the house that way, but not for this kind of money. We can think of many better ways to spend it. So it looks like we’re stuck with our shoe box of an extension. Sigh.