'Nother 'Verse Network

I am FINALLY a chick again.

Dog is here to stay. His parents are sharing him. I am the father and Remus is the mother, clearly.

You know, with the weather so nice, why don't we have a bit of a camp down by the lake some evening? I'm sure a couple of tents could be managed from somewhere, and a fire on the beach. We could have some songs and some games and some swimming, and it would be fun.


A couple of years ago we did a bit of a camp up the river - boats up to the camping spot and all that, right - it was actually the occasion for which my tent was made, the one we brought on campaign with us just recently, because we hadn't pulled the old tents out in a while and Margaery thought we should get new ones done up which would look nicer. The new one really does look nicer, in truth. It has these lovely carved ridgepoles that end in little deer's heads, and the walls are silk over canvas so you can open either or neither or both and be perfectly suited to the weather's requirements provided it isn't unreasonably cold. But of course that also means it needs two pack horses and seven men to put it up. At any rate it is what leads to what I think is the entertaining bit of what I'm saying here. You see during the getting out of boats and setting up camp part Robin (he must have been 2 at the time) got away from his nurse somehow, and his nurse had seen me nearby and so assumed I had him - it was a reasonable assumption, but really, if I'd taken him I'd have informed people; I know where he's supposed to be as well as I know where I'm supposed to be, and you can't just change things like that without notice. At any rate I hadn't taken him with me, and when I came by a bit later to get him the poor woman very nearly went into hysterics and I wasn't feeling particularly glad about it myself. Visions of little brown heads bobbing in the river-water or something, you know? So this put the camp in an uproar and I went tearing off to find his mother and sister and as I passed through the area where the pavilions had been erected I heard, or rather at the time I thought perhaps I had heard, a tiny sorrowful voice beneath the general hubbub. I headed toward our nice new tent and sure enough it became louder. I looked all around the outside and the inside and couldn't see anything, but I kept hearing it, and finally I found the source: that child had somehow gotten himself wormed in between the silk and the canvas layers of the tent walls, and he was lying on the ground all wrapped up in that fabric like a little caterpillar and crying because he couldn't find the outsides again. He did the same exact thing again the next morning before any of the rest of us woke up, and when I asked his nurse later I was told he tends to wrap himself up like that in his blankets at home, so I suppose it's standard and when he grows up my son will be the loveliest butterfly