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I did a 30 minute Apple Fitness session on my newly constructed rowing machine today. So so far it's only cost me £850 a go! Which is a result. I seemed to have the stamina to get through the session and it felt good. I reckon I will use this machine so much that it will come out as low as £100 a go before I have to dump it in a skip. Or maybe a river. That's surely where the rowing machine dreams of being.
Catie is a bit better, but still not well enough to be going out anywhere and I thought we had a couple of kids' birthday parties to go to. The first one was on the local rec and me and the kids walked up there, a little bit late, getting hot in the beautiful sunshine, only to find out that no one else had turned up. A bit of detective work revealed that the party is tomorrow. But we still got to play in the playground.
We then headed over to the other party, in a big garden with a hired bouncy castle. I drank a couple of non-alcoholic beers in the sunshine and ate some chicken nuggets that were meant for the kids, whilst the kids ran free. I am still not at the point where I feel comfortable with the kids out of sight, especially with Ernie who will always find the most dangerous thing in any environment and try to eat it. At one point he was playing on a swing behind a hedge and I tried to play it cool. But a few minutes later I checked if he was still there and he'd gone. We then saw him walking down from the very end of the garden holding a couple of things he'd found. He was so far away it was difficult to see what he'd got. Was that a screwdriver? I hurried towards him to stop him stabbing himself to discover he not only had a screwdriver but also something in a packet that on closer inspection turned out to be a horrifically sharp and scary looking blade for a saw. The packet had been opened previously, but luckily Ernie hadn't tried to get the blade out. It turned out these were tools that were kept in some drawers at the back of the garden, in a patch of nettles, that the dad of the house had said were so stiff that his kids couldn't open them. In the space of a few seconds my son had gone from the play equipment to find the most dangerous item in the vicinity, hidden in an impregnable fortress. I was just happy that he hadn't cut any part of his body off. But also just filled with jitters over the fact that he could so easily have killed himself. Never trust Ernie on his own. That's the lesson.
It's remarkable that we've never had to go to hospital with this child. But we're living on borrowed time.
It was a great party though and as usual I somehow got roped into the kids' games and ended up chasing them round and on the bouncy castle and failing to catch them, but succeeding in falling over a lot. Ernie, by this stage had spontaneously taken off all his clothes and then started wrestling some bigger boys who'd just turned up who were confused and scared of him. In many ways he takes after his dad. I certainly enjoyed being nude as a child though I am not sure I was so bold in the face of danger. It was funny to see five year olds calling out for help as they couldn't get away from his nude embrace.
No one got seriously hurt on the bouncy castle, though there was one bloody nose from a clash of heads (amazingly my kids weren't involved in that mayhem) and somehow my nearly 54 year old body managed to bounce and fall without any harm coming to me.
It was, of course, just terrific to be socialising again though perhaps having my son imprisoned in a house during his most self-destructive period might have saved his skin. I let them have loads of sweets and Ernie even drank some Fruit Shoots, which he never has before and which isn't really allowed in our household. I anticipated a difficult bedtime as the kids crashed from all the sugar, but they were pretty good and also properly tired. As was I after a pretty energetic day where I'd rowed almost 6km without leaving my house.
