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Woke up with a sore throat and feeling dizzy, but the current stage of this never-ending bug (or of this new strain if I am just catching one after another) only really seems to take effect at night time and once I’d done the kids’ breakfasts I felt like I was probably OK to do a Park Run. It’s a rare Saturday where Phoebe doesn’t have football. So I went for it and though it was a little tough I got round in almost my worst time ever.
Once I got home, Phoebe and Catie went to a party and Ernie and me stayed home. He wanted to play Cushion Dodge, which is a game in which I throw the cushions from the sofa across the room and try to hit the kids and they have to dodge out of the way. It’s fun for everyone. I get to attack my children whilst sitting down and they get to jump around. It’s tremendous fun, but also very satisfying when you get a direct hit. It’s a sort of revenge for them stealing your own life from you. It also served to be a great upper body workout.
Phoebe came back and wanted to go for a bike ride on the proper road. So I got another 30 minutes of exercise as we made attempts to cycle to various nearby villages before being ultimately defeated by the hills (we’re in a valley and there’s no direction that doesn’t involve some very steep inclines).
The lanes are narrow and cars speed along them, so there was the ever present danger of death, making the experience even more fun as I sought to protect my daughter. She, however, as with most things now, is a much better cyclist than I am (apart from going up hills) and I was blown away by her confidence. As a nervy child (and let’s face it, adult) I would have baulked at doing anything like this, but she has no fear and actually got annoyed when I took her down a private road with hardly any traffic in an attempt to get to the next village. We’d actually got up the hill that time, but she insisted on turning round.
Cyclists are the bane of motorists in this particular area (as if that was any different than anywhere else) and I am often held up by groups of lycra clad middle-aged men who refuse to cycle in single file. There are an awful lot of them. But now we were on bikes we were two of them (though if you ever seen my cycling in lycra you have permission to run me off the road. The middle-aged men were saying hello to us as if we were the same. I felt shame, but I felt I belonged. Is this the beginning of the end?
Then Ernie went on a playdate with Catie and I stayed home with Phoebe and we played Scrabble (and having kids is suddenly the best thing that has ever happened to me) though Phoebe insisted on just playing on the carpet, with 5 letter hands and no board and any word she fancied using counted and the winner was the one who got rid of their last letters first. So what was the point in the rest of the game?
But still, if I can get her up to the required level at Scrabble then nothing else matters. My life will be complete. As long as she lives with us forever, never goes out and doesn’t get sick of Scrabble.
Packing a lot into this day, despite both parents not feeling great, we went for dinner in Hitchin, before coming home to put a tired Ernie to bed and play poker (I won -revenge for the ridiculous Scrabble defeat) and then half-watch Eurovision with Phoebe. I hope none of the acts had the same effect on Phoebe that the blonde one from Abba had on me at a similar age, especially the one with the human centipede. She wasn’t really watching luckily. She was looking at old photos of her as a 2 year old on he mum’s phone. She loved it. I found it beautiful but heartbreaking. In one video I am saying “Hands up who wants to be a stand up comedian!” whilst she does a Tim from the Office to camera and then raises her eyebrows as she tucks into her food. She won’t put her hand up, but shows who has the comedy chops in this family, outflanking the gurning, shooting goon with understatement.
She’s the winner.
