Tuesday 6 July 2010

Man-child

So, I've pretty much accepted that for the next few years I can kiss goodbye to family outings (except maybe in other cities where we wont be recognised) as I am officially the most embarrassing person to be around. Not that this should be taken personally though I'm told. "Noone wants to be seen with their Mum," my son keeps assuring me. My job has been reduced to on-call taxi driver as long as I don't talk too much or park too close to where I might be seen.

So in an effort to give my milk bottle legs at least an opportunity to breathe I have taken to adopting people who I can treat like my children on family type trips. On Saturday I took my 17 year old daughter from another mother to the Carnival. Most of time seemed to be spent either following or running away from 17 year old boys. It was hard to keep up. I was sure we were running away from the same ones we were following. Not wanting to get too involved, in the end I left her to it..... Today I took my brother out to a country park. The park wasn't as good as we thought it would be, 'I wish we'd gone to the castle now' he said as we arrived after the 45 minute drive. But the children's play area did look fantastic... so we dug sand, swung on the baby swings, skated, slid, hung from monkey bars and bounced away. As we were bouncing madly on the see saw type contraption we noticed a ginger haired boy glaring at us...

"How old are you?" he asked my brother.
"28" he replied.
He looked at us both....
"Don't you have anything better to do with your time?"
I was kinda speechless.
He looked at me with disgust...
"You should be ashamed of yourselves" he said...

This boy, it turned out, was 6 YEARS OLD!


There was nothing I could say to this strange oversized extremely well spoken man-child.

Suddenly bouncing up and down didn't quite feel the same. I muttured something about there not being an age limit (there wasn't-we had even checked) as we sheepishly left the children's play area and wandered down to Waterstones where I browsed through ADULT books (not that kind) and my brother looked at maps till we got chucked out. My legs remain as white as milk bottles.

Ok, now does anyone have a REAL child I can borrow for next time the suns out and I have some free time?


(NB Ignore the t.shirt! My brother quite likes wildlife and I just dont have the heart (or rather I wimped out) to explain to him (or my prudish mother who bought it) that 'I love beaver' has two, quite different, meanings!)

2 comments:

  1. I've got four you're welcome to anytime...

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  2. I've noticed that you offering your children to me is a bit of a re-occurring theme on this blog!!

    ReplyDelete