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Half a bottle of wine last night, so obviously I woke up at 4am, with the creeping realisation that the illness that has kept my daughter up coughing for the last four nights has, of course, passed on to me. It was a pretty tough day to get through, not least because I had agreed to take Phoebe to baby gym this morning. Which is not the place for the hungover or fragile. But that’s pretty much true of all parenthood.
Even an ill Phoebe is a dynamo of naughty energy at these things. She doesn’t want to sit still and join in all the boring group activities but just run off and play on all the fun equipment with its bouncy bits and balance beams and bars to hang from. I tried to shepherd her to the right place, but she was hard to shepherd. I am impressed by her desire to assert her individuality, but does it show she’s a free spirit or a crazy whirling dervish out of control? Is she super smart or super not smart? Only time will tell. The other kids mainly sat in the right place, but following my daughter’s correct lead (the equipment was much more fun that the dumbass games the others were playing) a few strayed away from the herd.
There was one tricky moment where she worked her way along some parallel bars as another girl did the same in the other direction. Phoebe asserted herself a little too strongly and did a bit of a slap, before standing in front of the other girl with a “just try it” look on her face. I’ve seen my daughter be denied and bullied by the other kids in this situation, so had she learned this from that experience and how had she (correctly as it happened) judged that she had the upper hand in this situation? It’s fascinating to see this kind of stuff developing. For the rest of the session she was not such a bruiser and in fact, when the balls came out, sweetly went around giving other kids the ball she had and in the case of one girl deciding to give several balls. All again, about social structure and cohesion, but I prefer the sharer to the bruiser. All of us are a bit of both and we conveniently don’t notice when we are being mean to the people below us in the pecking order, whilst holding lifelong grudges towards those who were once above us.
I was just hoping it was a 45 minute session and would soon be over. But it went on for an hour and I just about held it together.
For the rest of the day I took it relatively easy, managing a little bit of emergency question writing in the afternoon and getting to 103 questions (I will need about 650 all together I think, which is a bit of a challenge - because I want them all to be good ones). I think the book is going to be surprisingly entertaining though - and we’re hoping to bring out an app version too.
I was meant to join my family and some friends for an early dinner, but I fell asleep at about 5 which was a huge mistake. I was out of sorts when I woke up, though we did watch the first episode of Freaks and Geeks on Netflix, which I remembered as a great show, and was surprised to see just how many stars of the future were in it. Worth a look - and Rick and Morty season one is now on Netflix too. That’s my favourite comedy series at the moment, so do check it out if you haven’t already.
I didn’t think I’d be awake to see the conclusion of the kickstarter, but I couldn’t sleep so I saw the seconds tick down. It finished just shy of £76,000 which is totally awesome and means we’ve covered if some of the pledges don’t get fulfilled or if we’ve forgotten about VAT or something and hopefully we can put any extra towards series 11.
Could have done with more sleep before another very tricky week of loads of work, but I’ll get through it. Or not. In which case I’ll have a long time to sleep.
