“a slug on a rug; purple!
an adder on a ladder; red!
a lion with an iron; yellow!
an… “
Mummy, what’s an iron?
That’s an iron there in the picture
But what’s it for?
Mummy’s moment of realisation; of course, he’s my child, when would he have ever seen an iron, let alone one in use…?
We’re in the first week back after the two-weeks of Winter break here. The first few days were filled with freezing drizzle, so our plans for picnics were shelved in favour of the cinema, twice; Madagascar 3 and Ice-Age 4 although the plots have rather blurred together for me; Madagiceage. Joni likes to sit on the front row which has but one advantage; namely that Danny can crawl around without being thrown out for public disorder. I’m sure the other parents think we’re unspeakable, particularly when we pretend we haven’t noticed him eating popcorn off the floor. Anything for a quiet life, I say, and he’s probably developing some great antibodies.
Then we went to Buenos Aires for a week, starting with a trip to the zoo:-
and going on to our annual team conference. From which we drove home (eight hours, that’s record time for us, it helped that the kids were asleep for most of it) on Wednesday evening and I spent the next two days in a no-man’s land of post-conference fog trying to drum up the brain-power to organise a Scout camp for the weekend just gone:-
We took over the rural school at Luis Sauce, where we didn’t do quite as much work on the school as I would have hoped beyond a little light painting, but we did have a good time and the camp-fire was electric (not literally, silly).
The upshot for both events is that I’m still on the team exec of our mission and I’m still the cub-section leader of our Scout group, definitely against my better judgement in both cases, and I’m also now the group-Scout leader which I’m still trying to figure out what that actually means before I decide how bad an idea it was. In my defence, I have not chosen any of these positions, on the contrary, if I have any self-insight at all it is that leadership is my most un-quality of all and I seek to avoid it at all costs. So I have no idea why other people find it amusing to shoe-horn me into these roles and I can only assume the major motive in all cases to be desperation, and more fool them when they get the leadership they have chosen.
And now here we are back at the ranch trying to figure out what it was we thought we were doing before the winter holidays got in the way. Looking forward to spring mostly I think. I don’t mind wearing seventeen jumpers and never seeing my own skin on Scout camp when no-one else is going to wash anyway, but I’m not sure I could get away with it for the whole of the next two months at home.