Saturday With Dad

In continuation of a pattern of late, I took the children off W’s hands this morning for a “Saturday with Dad”. In reality it had been engineered to allow clothes to be washed, ironed and packed ahead of a week at my parents. At 10 this morning I leaned into the playroom at home and interrupted what appeared to be some kind of disaster in the Little People zoo involving a Tyrannosaurus and the entire supply of carrots for the Seals. “ShoesOur 5 year old then turned into a little General. She does this at the moment - shouting orders to her younger and older sister to find their shoes, checking if they need to go to the bathroom, and being mother hen. We wandered out of the house, and I expertly deflected the barrage of “why?” questions from our youngest while en-route to the bus stop. “Where bus?” “It’s going to be here in…” (checking watch) “… about 6 minutes” “Why?” “Because it’s not here yet.” “Why bus not here yet?” “Because it’s somewhere else.” “Why bus somewhere else?” I stopped talked to her at this point. You realise after a while that it’s a calculated comedy routine on the part of our 4 year old. If you change subject, she smiles. Although her speech is far behind where it might be, we wonder just what IS going on in her little head - she seems old beyond her years at times. Her sense of comedy is spectacular. The bus journey was uneventful aside from a reflex reaction as our eldest fell off her seat that drew admiring smiles from an elderly lady who saw me do it. The bus driver appeared to have a moment of race driver envy, and caused everybody on the bus to lurch sideways - little Miss Eight was of course away with the fairies at the time, and almost shot across the bus - had it not been for a huge hand that caught her in the same manner than you might catch a pepper pot falling from the cupboard at home. The movie I had promised the kids was “Ice Age 3”. I’m not so sure what is most important to each of them at the moment - being with me for the day, seeing a great movie, going on the bus, eating huge amounts of popcorn, or feeling very important in a restaurant after while shovelling more junk food down… Ice Age 3 was predictably good - certainly far better than G-Force (which I described unfortunately at work as “Gineau Pigs with machine guns” - met with a surprising level of interest from fellow software developers). Following the movie and a trip to Nando’s for lunch, we went to the book shop. Where most of the day had been something of a chore, everything was repayed in the book shop. The kids raced to the young readers section and set up camp cross legged on the floor, pouring over all manner of books. If there is one gift W and I are trying hard to give the children, it is a love of books. Where we might restrict television, we never stop them from reading. While the eldest sat in the middle of an aisle reading a book she had found, I picked out “The Gruffalo” for our youngest, and sat reading it to our younger children in the reading area at the back of the store. “Dad - can I have this book please - is it too much?” “Nope - it’s fine. Right you two - we’ll carry on reading this later!” As I got up and held their hands to make our way to the checkout, an elderly lady browsing behind us turned, smiling, “Oh… I was enjoying that!”. Our youngest hid behind my legs. There’s something tremendously comforting about being the rock when children are unsure - when they hold your legs - hide behind you. Upon arrival home, our five year old amazed us all with a verbatim recounting of the entire movie from start to finish for her Mum. She may have got some bits of the movie back to front, or in the wrong order, but she more or less remembered the entire damn thing. I smiled more than once during the movie - looking across their faces in the darkness - her mouth gaping open, eyes wide. She is a sponge at the moment. If you’ve ever wondered what a 5 year old film review might sound like, it goes something like this; “There was this funny one, and he had three, and he kept dropping them, and then one fell in the air! But then he caught it but the mummy Dinosaur was really angry with him and kept shouting, and then this other one with a patch on his eye was really naughty! The elephants had a baby too, but it wasn’t a dinosaur, and they all laughed lots and nearly died. The big one fell off the edge too, and it was the Mummy that did it! And then I ate all my dinner!”