What Happens When You Let The Kids Plan Your Week - Part 2

If you’ve stumbled here without reading part 1, you can check it out here.

We took our rest day on Wednesday and declared it a pyjama and movie day. I enjoy the odd Sunday pyjama day, despite what happened the time I Should Have Stayed In My Pyjamas, but there was something slightly uncomfortable about wearing pyjamas on a Wednesday while everyone else was out living their normal lives.

Thankfully, nobody arrived at the door and the day off from travelling gave us a nice reset.

Thursday came and it was Grace’s turn. She chose the trampoline park, about an hour from home and somewhere they’d been a few times before.

We tried to get Cian in for free by claiming he was still under four. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of doing this in front of him.

“I’m four,” he announced, loudly enough for the man behind the till to hear.

We paid for Cian.

Being midweek, the place was much quieter than usual and they had the run of it.

Grace is the cautious one of my three kids. If something looks remotely dangerous, her preferred risk-assessment procedure is to send her younger brother first.

One of the attractions is a huge airbag that you jump onto from a platform a couple of metres high. Grace had always been afraid of it on previous visits. Naturally, she tried her usual method and sent Cian up to test it, but unfortunately for her, he was too small and wasn’t allowed on.

For once, she was going to have to conduct her own risk assessment. Eventually, she climbed onto the platform and jumped. Once she’d done it, the fear was gone and she climbed straight back up and did it again. By the end she must have jumped twenty times.

Grace chose Pizza for dinner so after missing out on Little Wing in Belfast on Tuesday, we found another one in Lisburn on the way home.

Little Wing do a 24-inch pizza which is so large it overhung the edges of our table. Naturally, I saw this as an opportunity to educate my family.

I started explaining that a 24-inch pizza isn’t merely twice as big as a 12-inch pizza. It has four times the area because the area increases with the square of the radius.

As soon as I mentioned pi, everybody sighed and Mary warned me not to speak another word.

After devouring the biggest pizza the children had ever seen, we followed it up with the smallest hot chocolate we’d ever seen. Grace found the contrast hilarious and proper belly-laughed when the hot chocolate arrived. It was the kind of laugh where you stop knowing what you’re laughing at yourself; you’re just laughing because she is.

It had been a fairly simple choice of day compared with some of the others, but Grace loved every bit of it. She’d conquered the jump she’d been avoiding for years, discovered what is now her favourite food (Garlic doughballs) and laughed harder at a tiny hot chocolate than she had at anything we’d deliberately arranged for her.

Afterwards, we took a walk around the square before heading home.

Four days down. One child left to take charge.

Cian was last up and, if I’m being completely truthful, his choice wasn’t entirely his own.

We planted the seed for his day. We knew he’d enjoy it, obviously, but we also had a mission of our own.

We had a kindle of kittens — yes, that is apparently the correct collective noun — which we had been slowly getting rid of. We had two left and my wife’s sister-in-law had put dibs on them.

Her family run a very popular farm attraction in Co Meath, about an hour from us, and while I knew she would definitely take the kittens, there was every chance they’d have kittens of their own by the time she actually collected them.

I wanted them away quickly before the kids became any more attached, so I called her to see if there was anything happening on the farm that week.

As it happened, they had an event called Grass Kids. Entrance included all the usual parts of the farm, with the addition of a ride on an open-air trailer to get a close-up view of silage being baled.

It sounded right up Cian’s street.

We booked in and headed to Co Meath on Friday with two kittens in a makeshift box in the boot of the car.

When we arrived at the farm, we were met by a young farmhand who spotted the kittens. He took them off me and, without any explanation, ran off down a lane. Another lady standing nearby, seeing the concern on our faces, assured us that the kittens had a very important purpose to serve. I smiled and thanked her, quietly praying they weren’t about to be fed to a larger animal.

Before the kids had much time to worry about what this “very important purpose” might be, a farmer with a whistle announced that a sheepdog show was about to start. A welcome distraction for my concerned, kitten-loving children.

The show involved the farmer getting the phone number of a pretty lady in the crowd, then instructing the sheepdog to herd a flock of sheep towards numbered boards scattered across a large field, spelling out the lady’s phone number.

I’ve seen a few sheepdog shows like this in my time and they never cease to amaze me.

Grass Kids was scheduled for 3pm but, knowing there were going to be large crowds, we arrived thirty minutes early. A few others had done the same and perched themselves on an empty trailer attached to a Massey Ferguson 135, the tractor I learned to drive on when I was Saorlaiths age.

We hopped aboard and took the opportunity to eat a few snacks while we watched the crowds grow over the next thirty minutes.

The closer it got to 3pm, the more sure I became that the trailer we were sitting in was the wrong one.

My suspicions were confirmed when a much larger tractor and trailer pulled up at the front of a queue we were now very much at the back of.

I briefly considered name-dropping my way to the front but decided against it and took this one on the chin.

When we finally had our turn, we were sat in an open trailer and driven alongside the tractors as they collected the grass, baled it, wrapped the bales, then lifted the finished bales and took them away to wherever wrapped bales live.

I grew up around farms and even I enjoyed getting such a close-up view of it.

After the silage, we took the kids to the mineshaft area, a series of tunnels not much wider than the children, where they could crawl in one end and appear out the other.

The tunnels were rated EASY, MEDIUM, HARD and OVER 12s.

They mastered the first three fairly quickly and, with a little encouragement from her cousins who live at the farm, Saorlaith attempted the over-12s tunnel.

Grace wasn’t keen and, just like the airbag at the trampoline park, suggested Cian, the four-year-old, try it first.

Cian was only too happy to oblige and, before I had a chance to grab him, his feet disappeared down the tunnel to audible gasps from other parents nearby.

I probably could have grabbed him if I really wanted, but I thought getting the photo below was a better use of my energy.

Again, the other parents weren’t impressed.

Five minutes passed and there was still no sign of Cian or his sister.

I was doing my best to appear calm, but I was beginning to think taking the picture maybe hadn’t been my finest parenting decision.

Grace grabbed her cousin Nicky to send a search party down the tunnels just as I heard the familiar laugh of my eldest echoing through one of the chambers.

A few seconds later, Saorlaith shot out the exit hole, followed closely by Cian, who, before we had a chance to congratulate him, ran straight back to the start and jumped in for a second go.

Grace was happy it was safe now, so dived in after him, with Saorlaith following close behind.

After the tunnels, it was time to go home.

We took a detour off the stoned path to look at some llamas, where Cian stepped ankle-deep into a pile of shite.

I cleaned off what I could with some leaves, but eventually had to take his shoes and socks off and carry him the rest of the way.

It was on the walk back to the car that we heard someone ask where the kitten show was. We’d been having so much fun we had forgot about the kittens.

We eavesdropped on the conversation and followed the family to a small shed, where loads of kids were sitting with kittens on their laps.

I scanned around looking for ours but couldn’t see them.

I was beginning to fear the worst when Grace pushed through the crowd towards a rabbit cage holding our two kittens.

She asked the lady manning the kitten station if she could hold one, but the lady said no. She explained that the kittens had had a very long journey from Northern Ireland that morning and were still getting used to the place. When she’d taken them out earlier, they’d kept peeing and pooing on people, so they were staying in the pen for the night.

Grace explained that they were our kittens and asked if she could try to calm them.

The lady agreed.

Saorlaith and Grace each took one and the kittens lay on their laps, quiet as mice, for the next ten minutes.

Grace felt ten feet tall for being the one who could fix them.

Eventually, we put them back, said our goodbyes and headed for home.

It’s funny, looking back, that very little of what I remember most about the week was actually part of anyone’s plan.

Nobody planned for Grace to finally jump off the platform she’d been avoiding for years. Nobody planned the world’s smallest hot chocolate, us confidently sitting on the wrong trailer, Cian disappearing into a tunnel meant for children three times his age or our kittens unexpectedly becoming part of the entertainment.

We’d given everyone a day to choose exactly what they wanted to do.

As it turned out, some of the best bits were the things none of us chose at all.