6622/19542
The kids were up at 6.30 as usual and I'd had less than 5 hours sleep, but I was very glad to get up and see them. Especially when the boy realised it was me, shouted "Daddy!" with utter glee and ran into my arms. There's not much better than that.
Then I went into my teenage 5 year old's room and even she forgot to maintain her coolness and also excitedly shouted "Daddy!" I didn't get a hug, but the double display of love brought tears to my eyes.
If parenthood is a barrel then moments like this don't even get the whole bottom wet, but they make up for the absence of beer for the rest of the time.
I made them pancakes for breakfast and felt glad to be home.
The feeling didn't last long. I had been writing yesterday's blog over the course of several hours, starting it when I got home last night and adding to it over the day. We were sitting on the sofa watching a Disney film and I finished the thing off. I was quite pleased with some of the turns of phrase and a couple of inventive ways to make the boredom of the day seem interesting. My son was sitting beside me and started kicking at the keyboard. I asked him to stop, but he thought it was funny. I'd just selected the whole document to copy across to the website when he hit the keyboard again and deleted everything and replaced it with a letter t and some punctuation. Even though there is an undo button on Evernote (the app I use), for some reason it decided that it couldn't undo this total deletion. The blog was gone.
I made an effort to recreate it, but as you noticed, it was half-hearted and didn't capture all that I had done before.
It was hard to be cross with my son. He didn't do it on purpose and the undo debacle was nothing to do with him. But I managed to be cross with him anyway. All the magic of this morning was ruined. Why did I have kids? Not only do they lead to boring blogs like this. they also delete the blogs that might have something in them. Why aren't you deleting this one, Ernie, you monster.
He actually just grabbed at my screen right at that moment, so he's doing his best.
Why did I come home? I could be sitting in a freezing castle doing nothing.
I was pretty exhausted by the evening - I even managed a five minute sleep, including an intense dream, as I sat on the sofa watching cartoons with the kids - but we got a takeaway and watched Ghost. My main surprise was the weirdness of Patrick Swayze's character's name. He's called Sam Wheat. Just seems an odd surname to me and an unusual one to choose for a hero of a film. But then my name's Herring. so maybe I can't talk. But it sounds like they made up the name over breakfast on the way to the pitch meeting and read it off a cereal box. Sam Kelloggs would have been better. Or even Tony Tiger.
It's actually a pretty solid film, though I'd have liked to have seen the world of ghosts explored a bit more thoroughly. There are a few bits where the ghost interact and they're the best bits. Whoopi Goldberg is a deserving Oscar winner and Demi Moore is strong too. Swayze is OK, but his acting is sometimes not up to the challenge of the weird things he's asked to do (like what face do you pull if you've just passed through a human body or a lump of wood). I'd also think they shouldn't have cut to it being Swayze when Sam Wheat is in Whoppi's body. Imagine how powerful it would have been to see the two female leads having to express their love by touching each other. That is what is actually happening after all.
The Punani album has been added to
Sticker Manager if you're looking for swaps
