Brrrrrrrrrrr

March 1st, as well as being St David's Day, marked the 3rd birthday of J-cub's future bride, the daughter of one of our oldest friends. It was her party yesterday, and we happily trekked all the way to Cardiff to celebrate with her. It was a yellow-themed party, with yellow balloons, all-yellow party food, yellow dresses, and yellow decorations. There was also jungle-themed entertainment laid on, with lots of pretending to be animals and game-playing. J-cub has just learned the sign for hippo, and ran around enthusiastically signing 'hippo' and getting upset when no hippo actions/noises/masks were forthcoming. He was about a year younger than most of the children there (although the same size, if not bigger than most of them) and so didn't quite understand most of the games, but enjoyed wearing himself out nonetheless. Most of our pictures show a blur of motion like this, as he ran round and round and round and round...

He also partook in his favourite Tumblies (our gym class) activity of falling dramatically over and the crawling around a bit.

He lapsed into a sugar coma on the way home and awoke with a yell somewhere around Port Talbot, scaring the life out of me and Jamie who were enjoying a peaceful drive and had quite forgotten he was there.

We got home to find the house suspiciously chilly; we'd left the heating on low as we were only going to be gone for a few hours and the house hadn't really warmed up in the morning. After turning the heating back up and waiting a little while, we ascertained that in fact, the radiators weren't hot at all. And there was no hot water. The boiler was on, and firing, and complete with pilot light, but that was it. A few phonecalls later and British Gas confirmed they can't get anyone out until Monday morning.

J-cub chose that moment, for the first time in his life, to stand by the door, saying "Bah, bah" and waving his arms around in a windmill fashion. We had no idea what he was talking about, but having exhausted all the usual options and seen him get more and more frustrated and upset with us, we opened the door so he could show us what he wanted. He scrambled up the stairs and ran into the bathroom. "Bah bah!" he said excitedly. Oh. Bath. For the last I-can't-remember-how-many months, J-cub has hated baths with a passion, has to be dragged screaming upstairs and plonked unceremoniously in the water, where he does actually enjoy himself for all of 3 minutes, before he demands to get out. WHY he chose yesterday to decide he wanted a bath, I have no idea. Poor baby.

Luckily, our shower is electric, so later on today I can fill the bath with water from the shower and he can have a bath. Obviously, he won't want one by then.

We dug an old electric fan heater out of the garage (not used for 10 years, still pristine-looking and perfectly functional), and used it to heat his bedroom and upstairs last night. Lots of hot coffee, hot food and blankets kept us warm last night, and we're off out today to warm up somewhere. I was woken by loud teeth-chattering yells this morning, and J-cub is now wearing about 20 layers and we haven't opened the curtains yet, so we can retain what little heat we have.

We would strongly appreciate some collective vibes for an easily-fixable problem, rather than a replacement boiler ... please ... ARGH!