Washing line

Today is Mother's Day in NZ. Because of this we went out to lunch to an Indian restaurant, then my treat was to spend time without the kids going shopping (not sure if this is quite what Mother's Day is intended for but it worked for me!).
While I was out Paul decided to put up a washing line as the concrete in the garden is now finished. He decided it would be best to have Noah with him, helping him. Noah "helped" by turning off the outside gas tap and the two switches for our heat pumps, he then came inside and turned off every switch in the fuse box, then went back outside to the play house and threw stuff over the fence into the college behind us. Paul decided to give him a specific job of holding the new clothes line and keeping it safe while Paul fitted hooks to the posts to hold the line up. Once Paul had done this he asked Noah for the clothes line but it had disappeared. Noah kindly suggested multiple places it could be none of which were correct. Paul then called in the big guns ie J! One of the benefits (and there are not many) of fostering a child who is hypervigilant due to her past, is that she is incredibly observant and usually very good at finding things that are lost (she's even better if in fact it's something she has hidden as is often the case, but that's another story).
Paul gave up then and calmed himself down by walking with the children by the river side to meet me walking home from the shops.
I love hearing stories like this when I haven't been involved and I thought it was made even better when J said "I don't see why we don't just steal a washing line from someone else's garden, at least we'd have one then."