Watch with Mother

Whoa, is that the date? Somehow this week has totally disappeared. I say ‘somehow’ but really I know exactly what’s happened and I’ve been dreading this week for ages. A combination of out-of-town meetings and in-town social engagements with good friends meant that this was always going to be a week where I spent less time with my little bundle of fatness than I would have liked and more time roaming out and about like a real human. Luckily for my Motherhood brain, the Frog has been working all the hours in the world and so spud and I have had weekends together. All this loveliness in the state of my working, social and home lives however does mean that anything involving my own personal life, such as, oh, I don’t know, brushing my hair, paying my bills, er, blogging, has been pushed into the cupboard under the stairs with the ghost of Harry Potter.

So, here I am. Today was quite a good day, not least because it marked the end of all the busy-ness but partly because me and my spud had some tickets to Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends live on stage. A very clever friend of mine has put this show together with the proper Thomas people and it was really rather good. Hordes of screaming boys - and I think the audience was mainly boys – hordes of little, sticky, screaming boys waving lit-up Thomases on sticks and tugging giant Thomas balloons were shouting ‘toot toot’ on command and standing on their seats so that they could better see the trains.

I showed up with three friends, two of whom had boys of the Thomas age who already have all the Thomas books and half the toys and one with a small Einstein aged as the spud – a year and a half. And speaking 81 words.

Now, I must confess that I have not introduced the spud to Thomas the tank engine as yet, mainly because I don’t think he’d be that interested and partly because I am hesitant to introduce that level of pester power to my life given the alarming number of Thomas-brand toys on the market.

Given that the spud is therefore a Thomas-free zone and that he is, as I believe I may have said, only 18 months old and still formulating early relationships with things like stuffed toys and books, it rather seemed to me as though I may have wasted our tickets and that all that singing and dancing and giant train content might just be so much noise to him. My vision of the day went something along the lines of ‘find seat, spend fifteen minutes restraining the spud, lights go down, spend half an hour stopping the spud from tearing out the hair of the person in front and then slink out accompanied by Einsein’s Mum and her equally uninterested infant and head somewhere sane for coffee.'

Not to be. He loved it. He was transfixed the entire show – both halves he sat in my lap absolutely enthralled, munching on his cheese and raisins and watching everything intently – even struggling to stand up in my lap when someone in front blocked his view.

Well well well. There we have it – I have underestimated my little pomme de terre and I perhaps owe him an apology. I may have to wrap it in Thomas the tank engine wrapping paper however that will have to wait for another, less busy day.