Festival goers
We spent the weekend at a literary festival, which was good fun for some of us and not quite such good fun for the pre-teens among us [no One Direction - shame]. Toddler boy went wild running up and down ramps and cutting things with safety scissors, his latest craze. The problem was that he would run up and down a ramp [both backwards and forwards] and then when you least expected it and when hundreds of people emerged from various talks make a run for it. This meant hurling ourselves on him before he raced off for ever.
I attended a rainbow magic fairies party with daughter three. It was designated a three to five party, but she loves the rainbow magic fairies and, even though she was twice the height of everyone else, I think she enjoyed it. The only problem is that as soon as daughter three drinks anything she needs the toilet and then needs the toilet approximately every 15 minutes after that for an hour so halfway through the magic fairy party we had to make a swift exit. On the way back we acquired toddler boy who was attracted by the scissor fest involved in making a magic fairy bookmark.
Daughter three was quite keen to have some mum and daughter three time at the festival and perhaps rather rashly decided to accompany me to a session the birth and death of stars [not One Direction, sadly] despite my warnings. It was a really inspiring talk by a Cambridge astronomy professor, but it was a tad above daughter three's head. She spent the hour with her head in my lap.
Daughter two was mainly drawn to the festival by the promise of mango ice cream and spent much of the evenings rolling down grass hills and playing Nanny McPhee. She was mega excited about going to Wales, for some reason, which was where the festival was, and asked all the way from Oxford whether we were in Wales yet and then screamed as soon as we crossed the border. All the way home she asked whether we were in Essex yet.
Daughter one stayed plugged into her ipod all weekend and refused to take part in any child-like activity like making an alien. I tried to cajole her by making a Zayn Malik balloon alien, but she was not impressed.
My partner spent most of the drive to the festival asking me to press the button on the control panel of the car which shows how many more miles you can drive on the amount of petrol we had left. He has just discovered this function and is totally impressed. This summer we are heading for France and Spain, since flying is now prohibitively expensive after toddler boy turned two. I anticipate being asked every half hour or so to check the petrol situation unless he discovers another more exciting function in the meantime.
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We have all been there!
bushra rahman | Report this comment