NotSheep

I’ve been doing a lot of pointless driving. Not that I knew any of it was pointless while I was doing it, of course.

On Thursday I drove to the airport three times. The first time, we left soon after 8 a.m., to take Scratchy to catch his flight to Newark, from where he would continue to Toronto. I left Barney at home in bed - there isn’t room for everyone in the car, and he’d been out at Scouts on Wednesday evening, so he was happy to have a lie-in. The only problem was that I forgot to tell him in advance, so I had to wake him on Thursday morning anyway, or he’d have woken to an empty house without knowing we’d all gone!

After lunch I went back to the airport, to collect Scratchy, whose flight had been delayed by 14 hours because a part was needed to repair the plane (very reassuring!) He could have stayed at the airport, of course, but it’s boring and expensive, so he came home for a few hours. Before I went to collect him, I had to phone his mum, because she’d arranged to go with a friend to collect him from the airport, and we’d no idea when he’d finally get there. His mum isn’t great in English on the phone, so it took a few minutes to get past the “Who’s this? Who you want? I think you have the wrong number!” before I was even able to start trying to explain what was going on.

Eventually Scratchy did get on a plane, and the plane did take off. The delay meant he arrived in Newark too late for his connection, of course - and it meant he arrived in the early hours of the morning, when there are no commuter flights to Toronto (at least not on Continental), so he had another few hours to wait. By the time he got to Toronto, he’d been travelling for about 30 hours.

This morning I got everyone ready to be out before 9.30 to take Barney to a nearby town where they were testing a new life-raft - he’d volunteered for this during Air Cadets on Monday night. We woke to wild winds and driving rain but he wasn’t at all put off going. We got to the harbour and left him along with the other volunteers, and I started to drive home. I nearly finished driving home too, before my mobile phone rang - Barney, to tell me that the test had been cancelled because of the weather. On the one hand, wild windy weather seems the perfect time to test out a life-raft, since that’s the kind of weather it might have to handle once it’s in use - but I suppose once it’s in use it will already have been tested, whereas so far it hasn’t been. So I turned around again and went back to collect him again. 25 minutes each way, twice. It was time for lunch before we got home.

The rest of the week - well, apart from adventures already reported…ju-jitsu for George and Freddy on Monday night, where someone told Freddy that hundreds of the girls wanted to be his girlfriend. Freddy is my most boyish boy - he doesn’t do girly at all. Doesn’t like girls, won’t touch anything pink, believes Barbie is evil, etc. (Actually, I might be with him on the last one.) So he was quite bemused by this news, and didn’t really seem to have any idea what he should think about it. On Tuesday I cried off Beavers (it was Investiture, which I’d rather not miss, but on the other hand it meant they didn’t need a programme from me for the evening) because I was so tired and feeling achy, and didn’t want to get sick just as Scratchy was leaving for a week. On Wednesday Scratchy took Barney, George and Freddy to yet another Film Education showing (this one being for older kids) while I stayed at home with the others, and then in the evening George and Freddy went to Cubs and Barney had Scouts. On Friday we all stayed home, except for a brief trip out to collect a new inhaler for Jack, whose chest was heaving again. The GP didn’t want to phone a prescription through for him (against protocol, apparently - better to leave a six-year-old to have trouble breathing, obviously) but I persisted and eventually he agreed - although he still didn’t phone it through for another three hours. Jack’s breathing seemed pretty rough beforehand, but he had a remarkable recovery after just a couple of puffs on the inhaler and hasn’t needed any more since. Hm.