Admittedly, if I was any kind of parent, I probably wouldn't have let her climb up there in the first place, but I'm a great believer in the principle of natural consequences, which basically states that once your children have lost all their limbs, they'll never pick up a chainsaw again. Or anything else, for that matter.
The important thing is that despite my hands-off approach to parenting, Amelie's managed to survive long enough to learn from her mistakes, so I'm confident she'll never, ever, do anything dangerous again. Although she did stand on a swing with a skipping rope about two minutes later.
Anyhoo, as the video above shows, I took the kids to Jurassic Park yesterday. That's not the wind you can hear, it's the breath of a triceratops. With the weather unexpectedly clement, I decided to let Toby walk there, so I dug out Amelie's old toddler reins. She's been untangling them for the past four years...
As the responsible older sibling, I let Amelie hold the reins as we walked along the pavement, which gave her the chance to test her theory that as long as she stayed on the path, it was ok for Toby to wander into the road. Naturally I put her straight on that one, and she responded by letting go of the reins altogether, and telling Toby to take his chances with the traffic. Frankly it was a miracle either of them made it home alive.
But survive they did, and with Toby successfully heading for his afternoon nap (and Lisa not far behind him), I took Amelie swimming for a couple of hours. Her regular Friday evening swimming lesson had been cancelled with just over an hour's notice and no explanation, but things appeared to be back to normal yesterday, so I took advantage of the poolside free wi-fi, and inspiration from Amelie's water-based escapades, and completed my shark presentation for work.
And the good news is that we've now had this e-mail from the swimming school:
"Firstly apologies regarding the cancelled lesson on Friday – unfortunately a child was sick in the pool and this resulted in the pool having to be closed for 4 hours to allow the water to be chlorinated to kill any bacteria."
Apparently the chlorination only took one hour. The other three were spent fishing out the bits of carrot with a sieve.
3 comments:
I actually went 'snork' at the end of the first video. Please don't tell Amelie...you will, won't you? And she seemed to like me...
That's put me off my supper!
Don't worry, Z, I laughed at her too, but I carefully edited that bit out of the video in case people thought I was heartless.
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