Swings and spillage

Today our primary task was the dismantling of the swing and removal of it and the slide. Landlord is selling the old house and apparently these are not desired as marketing accessories for family-oriented target buyers. Who knew?!
The bolts were rusty and we had to do a lot of swearing, bashing, wrenching, macho posturing and spannering to bring our prey down. Eventually, like a zebra separated from the herd with a lion's jaws penetrating its flank, described in an analogy chosen by a blogger with a taste for hyperbole who had drunk too much wine one night, down it went.
When we moved in over 3 years ago, the swing was passed over two back garden fences to get to us, and we didn't entirely want it as it was already very old and we had kind of looked forward to buying new garden play stuff for our first garden (flats only in Brighton up till then). Now we can buy something new, so I'm looking forward to a bit of browsing for that. F loves climbing, so a combined climbing frame/swing thing might be good. We might manage to get the slide in still, on the slope at the back.

F has done little bits of reading, with little bits of prompting, from such varied sources as a Simpsons comic, the ELC catalogue and me playing online Scrabulous. She is really getting there now, currently at a plateau stage where she is less bothered again, but with the next couple of surges I reckon she will do it. She is going through a phase of asking about words a lot, what things mean, background info, which makes for very good conversations.
She found her lost tooth from the other day - somewhere in the bowels of the sofa, glad it didn't get swallowed. She has been watching The Sarah Jane Adventures almost on loop in the mornings, and a bit of Farscape - (ooooh, Claudia Black!). Also, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She has been doing a bit of den-making out in the garden too and generally been chilling out and becoming less tricky, as we have been less stressed.

The heating and hot water here have been a bit temperamental, think it's mainly just a case of getting used to the quirks.
We are still living amongst boxes and chaos, but don't really mind.
And today, the first spillage of juice on the carpet occurred, and it was complete bliss not to have to care! Was tempted to throw wine after it just for fun.