3/10/01 – Sean cooked a fillet of trout for himself.
4/10/01 – Sean cooked himself another fillet of trout. He’s very proud of his culinary skills.
6/10/01 – We went to Mullingar … found a very good fishing shop where we bought bait and line for Sean, so he was happy … Sean cooked trout for himself, Pauline and me.
10/10/01 – The kids made a big impression on [a guest] by being their usual charming selves.
14/10/01 – It’s a wet day, so Sean and I aren’t going fishing as planned … the weather improved, so I decided to take Sean fishing after all. Pauline dropped us at the nine-eyed bridge. The water was high, and very soon Sean had caught his first trout – a real beauty, which would have weighed a pound or so. He caught it with a spinner. Since it’s the close season, we put it back in the water.
19/10/01 – Sean cooked trout for himself … Pauline, Sean and I went to Lisgrey House for the parents’ association table quiz. Pauline spent the evening organizing and helping out … Our team comprised Sean, Ita, Rosemary and myself. We did very well – we came second, with 70 out of 80 answers, and won a bottle of wine each.
25/10/01 – Sean and I had a couple of games of chess – he’s glad to be back in the winter groove of chess and music with a fire in the hearth.
29/10/01 – I took Sean and Andy fishing in the afternoon – Pauline dropped us at the nine-eyed bridge. We fished with spinners, and Sean had soon caught a beautiful brown trout, which must have weighed three pounds or more. Andy had a keepers net, and we put the fish in it in the hope that Pauline would take a photo of it later. However, some time after there were two fishermen on the bridge, and Sean took out his trout to show it to them. It jumped into the water and was gone, to his disgust. He caught a smaller brown trout and I caught a rainbow, both of which we put back, of course. Good fun.
3/11/01 – Sean cooked a salmon cutlet for himself.
9/11/01 – We were woken at 4 a.m. by Sean’s crying after he had fallen out of bed – a long way to fall from the top bunk. He was OK … In the afternoon Pauline took the kids to Mullingar, where they bought a fishing rod and reel for Sean (his old reel was broken) and a reel for me. This means that Sean, Susanna and I now have a rod and reel each. Sean was delighted with himself.
11/11/01 – Pauline dropped Sean, Susanna and me to the nine-eyed bridge for a couple of hours’ fishing. We seemed to waste a lot of time getting lures out of trees and so on, but I managed to catch a fairly small rainbow trout … Sean and I played a few games of chess.
26/11/01 – Eamonn’s cows got out of Ned’s field – I followed them down the road, then climbed into the field past the red house, sprinted to get ahead of them, and drove them back with some help from Andy and Sean.
29/11/01 – Pauline and I had routine meetings with Sean and Susanna’s teachers at school. Susanna’s report was uniformly good, but Sean is a little weak in some areas – fluency of English reading, Irish. He’s also inclined to daydream at times. He’s particularly good at maths. We had been aware of all this.
The road to God knows where ... Brendan O'Brien 
Nice post. What happened to the dawgs in the picture?
Thank you, CR. They were two of, I think, 17 that we fostered over a period of a couple of years. All got good homes.
The photo would have been taken for a charity website offering them for homing.