A plague of frogs on your house!

This is quite extraordinary. Oisin has been at Easter Camp for 4 days now and on every occasion I've been able to say goodbye and leave him quite happily; what a difference to his refusal to allow me to leave him when he was at school in Portsmouth! In fact he likes the whole experience so much that every morning he comes charging into the bedroom at 6.30 asking if it is time to go to school yet, and have I made his lunch yet and can we leave yet! He thinks Miss Myrna is lovely and she certainly is a great teacher. Yesterday they made cup cakes and today they are decorating them with marshmallows (apparently!). They've also been learning about Easter and Osh was asking me last night why they dug Jesus up from his grave after 3 days...me thinks the mechanics of the story have become a little muddled and it sure is a harder one to explain than Christmas!

Miss Myrna taught Daniel when he was about the same age and then she left to teach in Bermuda for 10 years where she developed a passion for gardening. There is not much vegetable gardening going on here (not the most hospitable climate for it, although it is possible with a bit of patience) but the good folk of Bermuda love their vegetable patches and Miss Myrna and I were swapping tips yesterday...like how come thyme refuses to thrive in this climate? You'd've thought that hot and dry was perfect for thyme but it obviously doesn't like this type of hot and dry.

This has also been a very very wet week. Monday was dull and cool (by WI standards), Tuesday started out much the same (it had rained a little overnight) but by 11am the rain started and boy did it rain. Torrents of the stuff came down for a good 2 hours and then it rained steadily for the rest of the day. Nicky and I had been to a meeting about the Blue Loos and decided to pop in and see a developer interested in some landscaping when the rain began. When we left that meeting the main road up the middle of the island was awash with rain with huge, deep puddles everwhere. Nicky was a little nervous about whether we'd get home or not - apparently diesel 4X4 are better in that amount of water (we were in the gas truck) on account of the electrics or something. Ignorance, I believe, is bliss because I'd driven in driving rain in the truck before and had been happy as Larry! Anyway, we did make it home but only because Nicky knows enough short-cuts that enabled us to avoid the inevitable snarl ups as saloon cars ground to a halt in the 2' deep puddles. Everyone is gnashing their teeth that the government spent a small fortune tarmacing the road (which previously when I was here was full of pot holes with treachorous drop offs on either side) but Johnston Int. who built it didn't take drainage into account. Compound this with the rapidly shrinking amount of natural drainage (disappearing under an ever widening carpet of tarmac and concrete) and real problems emerge.

I finally managed to get a batch of laundry dry yesterday when it was sunny long enough in the afternoon to dry it out and the house has an air of dampness about it and a permanent trail of muddy footprints from the dogs but the grass has suddenly sprung back to life (Nov-March is very dry, April and May see the 'May Rains' then the hurricane season begins!) and the frogs are out in force.

Tuesday night we were treated to the most awesome chorus of frogs. Most nights we hear them from the irrigation tanks, but Tuesday they were all around the house - hundreds of them croaking away. Couldn't see them (it being dark and all) but they were in full voice. Last night I went into the TV room to find a (tree) frog on the sofa, one on the floor and a huge one on the wall. Really pretty things (dull green, mottled yellow rather than a bright green) but all looking rather startled. Given their look of surprise I convinced myself that a plague of frogs was not upon us (I think plague frogs would look more menacing) and just got on with watching the TV.

With my translations out of the way I've been able to find time to read books and have recently finished 'A Proper Marriage' by Doris Lessing which I thoroughly enjoyed (although the next one in the series bored me very quickly - endless discussions about Communist party meetings didn't enthrall me) and right now I'm reading The Time Traveller's Wife which is excellent. I can see that my ambition to finally read Pride and Prejudice is coming to naught....still only on about Chapter 20 of that. Last week Osh plucked Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator off the shelf and asked that I read it. I thought he'd bore of it very quickly, having few pictures in it but he was enraptured by it and we finished it last night. I'm sure I must have read it as a child, bits of it seem familiar, but it was fun reading it again and he is very proud that he has read a 'big boy's' book! Well, listened to it at least. He is intrigued by the concept of Minusland and what a minus number is. I might have to shelf that next to resurrection and explain it to him when he is older.

Buoyed up by my success with the cookies, I'm going to try and make a banana cake today. We have a pile of old bananas which need using up, so I'm going to have a go. I don't know why cooking with a foreign cooker, armed with foreign ingredients makes me nervous - after all, I'd cook such a cake in England without batting and eyelid - but there you go! Just got to work out what shortening is....I know Mama's little baby likes it, but that is not much help!

We still have 11 chicks - which is good news (the rain and the ensuing cold tend to kill them off) but no eggs yet.