Me: Can I do a sum?
Daddy: Sure
Me: What’s 21?
Daddy: Er.. three sevens?
Me: No
Daddy: Blackjack?
Me: No
Daddy: What then?
Me (triumphantly): 31!

“The mother said, “You lunatic! Where are the beans that I can pick?”

Me: Daisy calls me a Lunatic, every day when she goes to school
Daddy: When she goes to school? (It’s the final halcyon days of summer holiday)
Me: When she goes to Hertford. Every day.
Daddy: She’s not going to Hertford next term.
Me: She will call me a Lunatic every day at every school and every work even when she’s grown up!

–
format via @mylo cheers

I wonder what this post was meant to be? I’m still not really tall enough to do standing-up wees (except for toilets of reduced growth) so it can’t have been that. I wonder if it will appear at the top of my blog or back in it’s place in the queue? We’ll see. Perhaps the title was a typo. A typtle..

So Super-Eddie went up to his attic hellhole, and emerged with another Gameboy Advance SP in black, an original Gameboy Advance (the one without a backlight) and a bandolier of games. And gave them to me! What a super-dude. Thanks, Eddie!

I never had to be helped by the attendants – even when I crashed (because I wasn’t looking where I’m going, natch) I recovered easily. Some of these two and three year olds just weren’t very good drivers, I’m afraid.

Some random episodes widdershins in my recent escapades:

We went to Hove Park today. I was the helicopter-fetcher in a boy’s confab around a little remote-control helicopter, a task I performed with zeal. Up till then, I was climbing on the Corporation Council Climbing Boulders – four or so hefty stones, one and a half dad’s tall, with hews (if that’s what you get hewn) where you can put your feet and hands. They’ve pitched it so if you’re a small child like I reluctantly admit I am (although I AM VERY STRONG, at least I say I am in my own kitchen) you need a hand to get up, there are no routes available to anyone less than 120cm or so. Given a start, of course, I just nipped up, it was easy. Daisy had been prevaricating, it was easy for her too, so she went up after that, though it wasn’t as easy to get down. One thing complicating getting up and down was the dozen or so Hove children draped across the rocks like feral spines on a dinosaur.

This morning we were at Mum’s Race For Life 10k run, a bouncy castle would have been nice but at least we got an ice cream. There was a fire engine in attendance but regretfully it had to disappear before we even got a sniff of clambering on it.

Back on Father’s Day we got out the Bolt DVD (this is a link to the trailer, if you haven’t seen it, or if you want the abbreviated version, animated hamster saves animated dog. Or cat. Or something. I’m not big on plot. With style! (*))

Anyway, we got it from the Ye Olde-Fashioned Video Shoppe (i.e. Blockbusters) on Father’s Day: watched once while Dad was snoring, once when he got up, and once when we got back from the park. Between time spent watching the film, I basically woofed it up (barking and playing Bolt and barking and…) for the whole day, some of the next week, and a good chunk of the following weekend: me and Daisy played Bolt and Penny loads as well (incidentally, the voice of Penny is Hanner Tanner who Daisy likes to watch on the Disney channel, so this added up to being a rare file we both liked). It was evidently easier to call me Bolt than James because all I would do was bark anyway. Anyway, I got over that, possibly because the film had to go back.. though I believe I have been promised that we will get the film. Possibly through iTunes, if we can still play it on our DVD player (??)

Over the last few weeks I’ve upgraded the video games I like to play: Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy and the infinitely varied game-space offered by the wonders of MAME (even though we only have A-D) have taken over from Spiderman 2 and Hulk. Although, to be honest, we all play the Mario games, it’s just me who gets engrossed on the likes of Cadillacs And Dinosaurs for as long as an Infinite Health cheat can keep me going, which can be a while unless someone kicks me off the MacBook.

(*) Toy Story 3 isn’t out until next year, too, just in case you – like me – we let to believe it might appear this summer. Can you you really buy film-related yoghurts more than a year before the film is released?