A second story seemed to be our best bet, but it would be expensive to add a couple of rooms upstairs, and it might necessitate strengthening the present ceiling and roof in order to make them support the burden. We decided to file the idea away in our minds for future consideration. We alleviated the space situation to some extent, temporarily at least, by getting bunk beds for the children and moving our bed into their room. That left the living room as a living room, not a combination playroom, living room and bedroom. The bunk beds were along one wall and our bed was along the opposite wall, with the foot of it near the east window that overlooked Featherbren's new lawn and his row of oleanders. Between his cherished, thrice-daily watered lawn and our window was the four foot expanse of land that the building code demanded should be left at the sides of the land when the buildings were constructed. Grant finally got around to carrying out a plan we had made whereby Donna wouldn't be underfoot all the time, and whereby she could go outside in the sunshine without constant supervision. He fenced the whole four foot strip, from under the bedroom window clear along the cabins from number 2 to 6. Out in the field behind the cabins, he let the four foot strip widen into a fenced yard about twenty feet square. Later, when Donna was big enough to need a larger yard, but not yet big enough to be trusted to run around loose, he would fence our entire field behind the cabins for the children to play in. The biggest complication now, of course, was that there was no back door through which Donna could go into her four-foot runway. Grant could have taken out the east window and substituted a door for it, but it would have been a lot of work and expense. "She can climb up on the foot of our bed," I suggested, "and then---" "And then what? Jump out the window?" Grant has a low opinion, not only of my capability, but also, I'm afraid, of my common sense. I suppose in a way his attitude is justified: he is so capable, and his ideas are so good, that my feeble little brain children seem to him very poor by contrast. However, this time I felt that I had a good idea, and I elaborated upon it, in spite of the sense of helpless inferiority he always inspires in me. "Well, there could be boxes outside for her to climb onto," I said. "You know, a big box on the bottom, with its closed, solid side up; another smaller box sitting right in the middle of it. You know, sort of steps." They were "sort of" steps when Grant got through with them, all right. He followed my basic idea, nailing and pounding out there for about an hour, and finally he called me to look out the window at the finished product.