The Boyo turned two this weekend. Two! It feels like just a few weeks ago he was this tiny baby.

And now he’s this little boy who likes dragging me around the house by my finger, shrieking at the top of his lungs, climbing on things, and giving me gray hairs.

We celebrated his second birthday on Saturday with friends and family. Everyone had a great time – especially him. He spent the day pulling people out of their chairs so he could climb into them, and then walking from chair to chair to chair.

Like I said, Boyo is hell bent on giving me gray hair.

Anywho, while the party was fun, we were exhausted by the end of it because we had done so much in the week or so leading up to it.

Which is why I didn’t blog at all last Wednesday because there was so much going on.

See I had decided the Monday before the party that I wanted to get rid of the wallpaper trim in the dining room. So I tore it down and painted the wall behind it the same white as the rest of the house. Hubby and I had also agreed that we would patch the holes in the bathroom from when we replaced the vanity light, so I tackled that as well and touched up the paint in there. Then, because I was in a painting mood, I touched up a couple of spots in the kitchen that had been bugging me.

Then there was the cleaning. All the sweeping and swiffering and dusting.

And at the very last moment, I decided that I wanted to crochet my son a stuffed duck, because he loves Duck from Sarah & Duck. It turned out very well, but in typical toddler fashion, he wasn’t impressed.

So the past couple of days have been spent relaxing and recouping and being stunned that we have a two year old.

Surprisingly, despite all the chaos, I have been able to do some writing. It’s all been on projects that I plan to publish under my pen name, but still. It’s something.

I’ve also been considering some of the problems with The Descendants. Here I thought changing the setting was the only issue. But it suddenly hit me that Vivian’s love interest doesn’t show up until book two of the series. Which is kind of a no-no in series that feature romance. I thought I could get away with it since the Throne of Glass doesn’t bring in the love interest until later (though, to be fair, there is a sort of love triangle in the first book). The love interest had other ideas though, and now he’s wormed his way into the first book, and he keeps trying to talk me into making a bigger and bigger role for himself.

Which brings me to this weeks Wednesday WIPpet snippet (which I shared a small bit of on #2bitTues on twitter this week). Vivian has escaped the villa, and is wandering around the town of Thera, trying to avoid notice and find a way off the island. Unfortunately, her best efforts to avoid detection by the guards fail miserably, but thankfully another outsider is nearby and decides to help.

Since today is the 21st of July, here are 6 paragraphs (7-2=5+1=6)

As always this is a rough first draft.

The man led her away from the alleyway and away from the crowds of the marketplace. Even though she knew she shouldn’t relax – who knew who else might stop them and question them, and if her rescuer was really as trustworthy as he claimed – she felt some of the tension leave her shoulders as the press of humanity thinned to a trickle.

As they traveled further away from the main thoroughfares, the streets became narrower and the buildings became plainer and shorter. Children ran past them, and Vivian twisted out of their way, desperate to avoid any contact with them. The red headed man gave her a strange look when he noticed her odd behavior, but other than that he didn’t comment.

He stopped suddenly and stepped through a door on the right. Rather than follow him, Vivian lingered on the stoop, eyeing the painted plaster advertisements on either side of the threshold. While she couldn’t read the language, she assumed, based on the pictures and the raucous voices pouring into the street from inside the building, that the place was some sort of bar. Lovely.

Well, it wasn’t as if she had any other option at the moment. Bracing herself, she stepped inside the establishment. As she did so, a man who was three sheets to the wind stumbled past her, and she pressed herself against the wall. Thankfully only his clothing brushed against her as he tripped over the stoop and on to the street.

Once inside, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim lighting after spending all morning in the bright sunlight. The cloying smell of spilt beer attacked her nose, along with the stench of unwashed bodies. She gagged and pressed a hand over her nose and an old man sitting nearby guffawed at her discomfort.

She finally spotted her rescuer sitting at a table near the back of the room. A stout man with short dark hair peppered with gray was speaking with him. As she drew closer, she noticed his accent was similar to her companion’s – rough and earthy, with a bit of a burr. Almost Scottish, if she dared to hazard a guess, but not quite. Like the rest of the things in this world, it was just slightly off in a way that was hard to put her finger on.

To read more WIPpet Wednesday posts, go here.