One word? When seven would do…

Honestly I don’t know why I bother!

Every year I have at least one burst of wanting to give something back to the local HE community and arrange loads of free and not free, local and not local, indoor and outdoor meet ups. Every year me and one or two other people who are already friends come along and I lose interest and decide not to bother again.

So today we did Paradise Park. It was pissing with rain, cold and windy. Davies got up late (midnight before he was asleep again last night) and Scarlett and I laid in bed for ages discussing meteorology and how it works in a dozy fashion before getting up, breakfasted, dressed and out. We picked Tasha, Toby and Vinnie up and headed to Paradise Park.

I don’t think we’ve been to PP with many people and not had at least one child who doesn’t like the dinosaurs in our party. Davies and Scarlett are not great with being understanding of other people being scared of stuff really. We have friends with a wide variety of fears and phobias from buttons, masks, spiders, daleks, monsters and more and because neither of my two ever seem to do the running screaming thing from things that are not very real obvious threats they tend to view other people being scared of things that to them are slightly irrational as either odd or funny. Neither reaction is good and when we talk about it afterwards or even if I catch it in time they are able to demonstrate some level of understanding and tolerance but at worst they can find it quite funny to tease. Neither Davies or Scarlett are without their foibles but as we tend to try to encourage them to face fears and actively attempt to do things that scare them I do appreciate how they struggle sometimes with other people seeming scared of things which to them simply aren’t scary.

So when we realised Toby was not at all keen on the dinosaurs, the loud noises they made or the various manequin type figures which suddenly seemed to be pretty much round every corner through the Planet Earth bit of Paradise Park I tried hard to make sure it didn’t curtail D and S’s enjoyment of walking through and pressing buttons while not scaring Toby out of his wits.

We got to the cacti bit where Vinnie had to be watched to ensure he didn’t succumb to the temptation of stroking the furry soft looking cacti and then we reached the koi carp indoor pond. You’re expecting someone to fall in the pond now aren’t you?

And you’d be sort of right. There was a pigeon lurking on one of the waterfalls which when it stayed still long enough for the kids to get close to we realised was probably trapped. I had a plan to rescue it but wanted to take a quick photo first which spooked it sufficiently to fly into the glass, crash and get knocked back into the pond. It floated a bit, swan like as most birds can but was going to get waterlogged and so Tasha clambered onto the little island in the middle to try and grab it. Whereupon it flew again into another window with a big crash and landed near the mini Chichester Catherdral. Undaunted Tasha climbed up there and grabbed it, looking a bit Godzilla like dwarfing (see I knew I’d get it in there Tasha!) the cathedral and took the pigeon outside.

It should have been beautiful. The bird rescued by the kind and loving heroine, releasing it into the freedom of outside like a dove at a footballers wedding, like the dove flying from the ark after the floods. Instead it flew with the full force of Tasha’s chuck…..and crashed straight back down again to the ground with a comedy cloud of feathers flying up into the air as it landed!

Scarlett and Davies gathered it up and we walked, an odd procession – the broken pigeon carried by children, me laughing a bit (a lot), Tasha, mortified with her pigeon abuser status, Toby, still traumatised by the dinosaur models and Vinnie, probably with cacti needles in his hands walking through the pouring bloody rain to put the pigeon somewhere dry for it to recover from the shock. It didn’t put it’s legs down when Davies rested it on a table and we assumed it had broken them. I was ready with my surgical tape splint idea but it didn’t seem to be needed in the end. When we left a couple of hours later the pigeon was still on the table but could stand and walk and Scarlett could no longer catch it so it was getting quicker. Hopefully it was stunned and shocked rather than seriously injured and would have been able to fly off later.

We spent a couple of hours in the amusements bit. Scarlett had a few moments of being a pain when she decided she was being left out of the boys’ game and wished she had a friend there to play with. None of the friends she suggested are day-trip distance of course. She also wanted more tokens when my change had run out and didn’t appreciate my explanation of the man emptying the change machines, token machines and amusements of respective notes, coins and tokens and swapping them round as being like the water cycle or the circle of life (Davies would have!) 😆

The kids all redeemed their tokens in the shop for sweets to eat on the way home and we went into Tasha’s for a cup of tea. Davies and Toby played on the playstation together and thanks to a quick thinking suggestion from Tasha Scarlett played on Toby’s DS (my two had left theirs at home) and eavesdropped on our conversation.

Back at home they did some drawing while I did an online food shop and then they watched the Morph dvd while eating their tea. Ady came home and we had The Man Who Wore All His Clothes and a good chunk of Why is Snot Green?: The Science Museum Question and Answer Book (Science Museum Q & a Book) which taught us all various stuff including me learning that the sea is not blue because it is reflecting the sky and Davies amazing us with his knowing several things to do with space and gravity (thank you George’s secret key to the universe I suspect). Good book though.