After the Party
We are still alive – and most credit goes to the staff at the local bowling alley, who seem to have the entire children’s birthday party routine figured out. I guess we also have the children to thank – at 11 and 12 years old they are infinitely easier to manage than they were even two or three years earlier.
Of course there were a few attention seekers (one boy in particular), but we didn’t have to stop, threaten, or remove anybody from the group.
While the main group of kids – 14 of them – took over several lanes of the bowling alley, I hired a lane out for myself and our eldest daughter, who would otherwise have been at a loose end. In the first game she managed to throw 5 balls in a row into the gutter – neither of us could figure out what she was doing wrong, other than suffering a colossal lack of talent. I wisely kept quiet, because she came back with a vengeance in the second game – bowling a succession of strikes and spares that saw her narrowly beat me.
Note to self – don’t play eldest daughter too many times at games involving hand-eye coordination. I mentioned the other day that she’s a natural swimmer – I’m sure that has something to do with it too. Miss 13 on the other hand (middle daughter) seems to have received none of the coordination genes. She plays rugby, which is more about bravery and brute force than finesse and form – and it shows in everything else she tries to do. She hefted the ball down the lane like a bricklayer throwing lumps of concrete on a building site, with predictably random results.
This evening I have resurrected a corner of the study as somewhere I can use a computer once more. For the last few weeks, after moving the desktop computers to the kids bedrooms, I have been using a Chromebook to write blog posts, and surf the net. I have now rigged up an old Linux netbook with a second screen, a keyboard, and a mouse, to turn it into a workstation of sorts. A tremendously nerdy workstation that can’t really run a web-browser because it has the horsepower of a particularly poorly hamster.