I have a confession to make:
I thought the reason I had less dumb stuff to write about was because I was getting better at adulting.
I was wrong.
Sad as they are, funerals do serve a greater purpose. Having our daughter and grandson over from Perth is a nice byproduct of my Dad passing away.
One of the first things we did to take advantage of having our grandson here was to through him a birthday party. Three months early.
We literally went to town and came home with chocolate cake, all of the chip flavours, lollies, little franks, party pies, a trolley full of presents and even a can of crazy string.
Everything you need to host an awesome party.
Except…
“Where are the candles?” Tracey asked me as she rummaged through the kitchen draws.
Years of similar stuff ups held us in good stead and we made do with the long matchsticks we were going to light them with.
And we laughed at how silly we were. How out of practice. How strange it is to fall flat on our well meaning bums with this.
How totally in keeping with the way things always were the moment there’s a young kid in the place all the things I do wrong suddenly start to crop up again.
“I’m going to cook dinner,” I told our grandson and pointed to the far end of the balcony with its kiddy kitchen and boxes full of toys. “You go down there and I reckon you might find some fun things to play with.”
If not I knew for a fact we’ve got about ten boxes of assorted fun in the storage above the kids’ wardrobes. And more inside the huge coffee table. And in even more boxes under a couple of beds or inside the window seats.
You don’t have seven kids over near enough to three decades and come up short on this stuff. Money, yes. Toys, no.
“Hey, Dad?” Miss24 called out from the other end of the balcony. She’d gone down there when she noticed her three year old son struggling to get something out of a box.”You don’t happen to have toy tools, do you?”
“Probably,” I called back, although I couldn’t think of any offhand. I flipped a snag as I thought about it. A vague recollection of a tool belt with bits attached was floating around in my head. “What does he want? A hammer or something?”
“A circular saw.”
That was a very specific, I thought to myself.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
Suddenly I was being asked to come check out a toy box.
So yeah, it seems I’m still doing a lot of dumb stuff around here which I could write about, if only I had a toddler or two handy point them out to me.
Raising a family on little more than laughs
