Engineer

Bar a few minutes in the witching hour at the end of the afternoon, when the Boy Wonder and I - both tired and hungry - threw a minor strop at one another, today was a thoroughly enjoyable day. 

This was taken in Stratford, where we spent an hour in the big playground on the rec'. The Boy divided his time between the climbing equipment, where he devised a game in which he was some kind of barista-cum-shopkeeper and R and I were required to buy his wares ("Hmmm. I've only got strawberry coffee left - is that OK? You can have chocolate sprinkles on it if you like. Good - that will be twenty pounds, please!"), and the sand pit. Here he was trying to work out what one of the sand toys was supposed to do, and coming to the conclusion that in fact it did nothing, and was just for show. However there are better elements to this equipment, and he enjoyed hoisting buckets of the beastly stuff sand up to the top of the climbing frame, and then tipping it back down a chute. 

Finally, after a loooong wait for other children to vacate, he fulfilled his ambition to use one of the mechanical diggers, and though the levers were really too long for his arms and the bucket too heavy for such a small person, he persisted with it for quite a while. At one stage we tried to coax him off so that another child could have a go, but he was unmoved. "I have been waiting for ages," he said, still battling the levers, and without even bothering to make eye contact, "and so far I've only had a short turn." Luckily, at about the point when this became embarrassing, it started to rain, and the four-year-old barrack-room lawyer promptly decided that he'd had enough of the sand pit, and it was now time to head for the supermarket café and a well-earned sugar top-up.

After dinner we (inevitably) found ourselves watching (for the three hundredth time) Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and R and I were extremely amused to see that the Boy's new obsession with climbing everything in sight still appeared to be active, even while his attention was riveted on the screen. His normal television-watching position is either on the sofa, tucked up in the crook of a grandparental arm, or standing on his trampoline, leaning on the support bar and occasionally having a bit of a bounce to express his approval of an especially good scene in the film or programme. Today he started out standing on the trampoline, but bit by bit manoeuvred himself up and over the bar until he was sitting hunched on top of it, bar in the crook of the knees, arms resting on top of the TV cupboard, and head resting on the arms. A better grandmother would probably have worried about him falling, or damaging his eyesight by watching the screen from a distance of about four inches, but I merely grinned at R, then fished out my phone and took some photos. I'm not exactly proud of this cavalier attitude, but it's probably inevitable: when I was eight or nine I used to spend most of every school break hanging upside-down by my knees from the top bar of the climbing frame, which was set directly into the asphalted playground, and I'm still here to tell the tale.