6776/19696
We took the kids to Willows in the morning - still no Mr Tod for Ernie to hug but he got a tractor ride and 45 minutes of soft play. Even though I am doing personal training, chasing a kid round a decent sized soft play, squeezing yourself through little gaps and pulling yourself up weird ropes and steps to the next level is not a bad work out (I did a 30 minute row later just to make sure). We bombed down the easy slide, which was still a bit scary for me, but then I am at an age where you can break a hip, but the steep slides (which are basically just vertical drops with a curve at the bottom) were too scsry for me and thankfully for the kids. I thought about asking how many children are injured on those. I have a feeling that it’s not none a week.
When we were on the tractor ride we were pretty much the only family who joined in with One Man Went to Mow and then there was a clapping song at the end of the ride that none of the other families joined in with, but my lot did. “We’re the only cool ones on this ride,†I whispered loudly to my wife.
Later I’d take Phoebe to her gym lesson. I got her playing “Would You Rather?†In the hope of her coming up with some good new questions for my book. It was a genuinely good chat. She came up with hers pretty much the same way I do mine, which is looking around my immediate environment and then picking something I can see. But we had fun discussing whether it would be better to be a park or a funfair, the sky or the floor, poo or wee (inevitably). It was fun discussing which questions were good and which were too weighted to one answer (or then arguing that you yourself would choose the less obvious one). Who’d have thought that Emergency Questions could bring parents and kids closer together? I mean I should have thought of that already. That was one of the reasons I started selling them.
I am doing puppet shows at night time for my kids (which is maybe where the puppet shows should have started and ended) - Ernie has Marvin the Monkey to say good night to him and Phoebe has Dragon Boneman. But the puppet they really want to see is the King of the World. If you haven’t seen episode 41 yet then look away, but the King of the World is now a disembodied head and a disemheaded body. I thought this development might freak Ernie out, but he still loves him. Charmingly he thinks the head is actually floating and when he grabbed it off me he couldn’t work out why it wasn’t floating for him. What have I done? The King of the World was my meal ticket out of here.
