Growing up and moving on

Work on the kitchen moves on apace. We now have plaster on the walls and some electrical sockets that work.
When J took off all the old paper he uncovered this:



No, not the awful décor we once had. It’s three years’ worth of height recordings for j from around 9 years ago. The markings come up to my chest. He’s now somewhere about 6 feet 2 inches and still growing.
And who can imagine we ever thought that terracotta (even allowing for the fact that the photo makes it even more yellow and vivid than it ever was) rag rolling was a good idea?!

Sometimes time passes so slowly, sometimes it seems to rush by. How can I be old enough to be the parent of someone who needs a signature to guarantee his compliance with AS level exam protocols next week?

You know that your children are growing up when they are not only 6 feet plus, but when you follow a blog link to a website that they think is unsuitable for you.... "Oh! My! God! I can't believe you're looking at that!" (I was only on the front page...) "It's the Wikipedia of everything that is sick and disgusting on the web!" (I was only on the front page, honest...) "No, it's just too horrible, the idea of you reading that stuff - it's wrong!" (it's obvious that he regularly gets further than the front page and may, indeed, be a contributor...)
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I was at a funeral this morning. One of our volunteers at school, Jean, died on the 2nd January, aged 72, after a year of failing health, but she kept coming in to man our library and work with the children. She never married and was a very modest, quiet lady and it was standing room only at the church for the service. An avid reader with a penchant for showtunes, she had been an engineer, a librarian, worked with inmates at our local high security prison and was a steward at her church. And she was a knitter and she knew the vagaries of our barcode scanner. She will be very much missed.