General Notes
This is a better story for Marigold's insightful questions and comments. Thanks, Marigold, for a marvellous and thorough job of beta-reading!

This story expands on a few chapters in At the End of His Rope. I've included a link for your convenience, if you don't mind spoilers. If you read that story, you will know how this one comes out. It is a long story, but the chapters are short! 

Chapters 3 and 5: Pippin's  birth
This part of the story is closely woven around another, Cousins and Other Nuisances.

Chapter 6. Interlude
The incident Woodruff is remembering takes place in the story FirstBorn, here on Stories of Arda.

Chapter 11. Into Deep Waters
Sorry about the cliffhanger, the chapters just broke naturallly and there's no time to type in more of the story. If you really cannot wait to find out what happens, read "In the Greening of the Year". Will update as soon as possible, but of course, there's an intervening "Interlude" to type in first, and this week I have almost no computer time. Apologies once again.

Chapter 16. Another Apprenticeship
Andy Grubb and his family appear courtesy of Marigold.

Chapter 30. Interlude
The treatment for polio described in this chapter comes from a scrap of memory of my own. I remember reading, a long time ago, the biography or autobiography of a nurse who worked in the wilds of Australia, and how she treated a child in the throes of acute polio. Somehow the child's leg muscles relaxed with the constant application of wet heat, and she was not left crippled when the fever passed. I wish I could remember the name of the book that I read this in!

Chapter 35. Wanderers Meet
Robin Tallfellow appears, wearing a different name, in All that Glisters (set when King Elessar meets his friends at the Brandywine Bridge in S.R. 1436). Lop the sheep dog is the very same who saves Pippin's life in Pearl of Great Price (set when Pippin is about twelve).

The scene with Lop and Pippin is patterned after a true story about an Irish Wolfhound, devoted slave to a three-year-old child a number of years ago.

Just a general note
"Wagon" is spelt "waggon" in my edition of JRRT's LOTR. Thus the seemingly odd spelling in my stories.