David Currie

As part of the drive to use up all of my remaining vacation by the end of the financial year I had Friday off work. After we’d been to Emma’s swimming lesson at Twyford School, we all headed in to Eastleigh for a bit of shopping. This involved taking back Emma’s new shoes which she’d managed to wreck on the slide on the way home from buying them. Shoes for a two year old can hardly be called fit for purpose if the soles can’t cope with a slide! I then went to the running shop to get some new road and off-road shoes whilst Christine went to Sainsburys where we’d parked.
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824We finally concluded that the best way for transporting two small children on walks from home (e.g. to the shops) is a double buggy. It’s just a bit too far for Emma to ride on the buggy board and she’s still a little reluctant to give up her seat to Duncan. This really wasn’t enough of an incentive to spend a couple of hundred pounds on what would be our 5th buggy so we bought one second-hand on eBay. Anyway, the point of the story is that this took us over to Portsmouth to collect it and we decided to try out our Culture-all Passport at another venue: Staunton Country Park.

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809For those out of the country, snow arrived in England last night. We didn’t have as much here as, say, my parents did in Hertfordshire but there was enough of a covering to get Emma excited in the morning. I had to go in to work (fortunately not cycling as I had to pick up a mountain bike for the event tomorrow) but Christine took Emma out in the snow. Unfortunately they timed it just as another flurry of snow arrived and Emma wasn’t particularly amused. Luckily Christine persuaded her to go out in the garden later in the day and they had great fun making footprints in the snow.

I took a couple of hours out of work this afternoon to go along to Emma’s nursery for their Christmas performance. I picked up Christine, Emma and Duncan from a friend of Emma’s birthday party and we drove to the nursery. Christine stayed outside feeding Duncan so, having handed Emma over to the nursery assistants, I had the pleasure of joining the audience of parents on my own.

The children were led in at the front of the room and all obediently sat on their coloured spots on the floor. Their subsequent rendition of various Xmas themed songs wasn’t as bad as you might imagine from a bunch of under-3s. One boy was in particularly fine voice much to the amusement of the audience. Emma was partly obscured from my view by one of the assistants but I could see that, despite having told us most of the words to the songs they were going to sing, she didn’t sing a word. She just had this look on her face as if to say “what are all these children doing?”.

After the singing was over the children were released to their parents and we filed out past Father Christmas. True to her word, Emma wasn’t scared of him this time. She wouldn’t say anything to him though and just stared at him intently. Having been told that he would park his reindeer outside she was a little disappointed to discover that they weren’t there when we left!

806Christine’s cousin was down at the weekend with her family and, having noted the rain on the forecast, we decided to head over to the Blue Reef Aquarium in Portsmouth on Saturday. What we’d failed to realise, until we heard a traffic announcement as we left home, was that the rain was to be accompanied by gale force winds! The M27 was an interesting drive as the car was buffetted about but the seafront at Southsea was quite something else. We arrived just before lunchtime and sat in the aquarium cafe (whose speciality seemed to be that well known Italian dish, panini and chips) watching the waves break over the sea wall. They then proceeded to close the section of road we had just driven along!
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