Warming Up

It was a rainy day, but the sun briefly shone after lunch and we went for a short walk to splash in the puddles. Well the kids did, the adults were too cool to do this. I don’t know why. The splashing looked like fun. Like running in circles for no reason, something changes in us at some point and we’re not allowed to be who we are.

The kids went full Peppa Pig (all right, they didn’t actually lie down in the mud) and splashed themselves so much that we had to have their baths super early.

It was a fun excursion on a day where we were double trapped in the house, by the rain and by the virus. The kids never lose energy, but both of us were laid low with exhaustion and it was a struggle to keep up the energy to keep them entertained. But we did OK with a lego tower building contest and a game where they were both witches with magic wands and I would have to change into whatever they commanded. Easy when you’re a frog or a monster. More challenging when you need to be hair, a tooth,  a nose or most trickily “nothing".

Parenting is just like impro without an audience. I did pretty well with the nose and they ran away from me as I tried to sniff them up. They just take this as something normal, rather than appreciating that they have a performer who up to 200 people in any town will pay to do this kind of stuff. Yet these kids are paying me nothing and in fact expecting me to buy everything they need for them. Thank God all my audiences aren’t this demanding. The sad thing is that I would probably do it if that was the only way to get them in.

As soon as I’d got Ernie to bed, I went to have a lie down myself and could easily have fallen asleep at 7pm, but didn’t want to be wide awake in the middle of the night, so I watched the football and played games on my phone and wished I was dead. 

If you told me twenty-five years ago that I’d spend Saturday night alone playing video games, I’d have said., “Really, so nothing is changing for me in a quarter of a century?”

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