Persuasion

Clare and I watched Persuasion. A sweet story, and both the little ones fell asleep; a very rare mother-daughter time with nothing else on the agenda except dinner baking in the oven. She is presently reading through my old Jane Austen collection.

Brendan and I have finished reading Beowulf. The tentative plan is to go on to Witness to Hope, the biography of John Paul II which comprises most of the major events of the 20th century.

I got Kieron an inexpensive snorkelling set and he is having fun exploring our pool. Both he and Sean say that they can swim now. Encouraging because a month ago Sean was telling me “I’m not the kind of person who’s good at swimming,” and this kind of thing fits into my family’s introverted pattern of excluding things from their definition of themselves when they are not sufficiently at ease with them. So the solution seems to be to put them in a situation where the accomplishment comes naturally to them.