After several emphatic requests and several not overly creative evasive techniques I finally sat down this afternoon to play Mario Kart with the Small Child,  It’s one of the drawbacks of having an only child – every now and again you get conned into doing things like playing Nintendo even though you don’t enjoy computer games and have many things you’d rather be doing.

So we settle in for some Mario Karting and the Small Child helps me choose ‘a faster car Mum’ and then picks ‘one of the easiest courses for you Mum’ and off we go.  I win the first race, he wins the next.  Then we move on to the more difficult courses and the Small Child and I seem to be fairly evenly matched.  I don’t know how to hurl the shells and things very well and choosing a good driving line is kinda hard because I’m not very good with the controls but we get along okay for a while.

We get onto the fifth or sixth course and the Small Child says to me ‘Mum you’re not taking the shortcuts ‘… shortcuts?  what shortcuts?  ‘Follow me Mum’.  The Small Child then proceeds to go flying past me with ease then spends the next half hour ‘going slow’ so I can keep up!  The little guy had been pulling his punches all along and had literally been letting me win a few so I wouldn’t lose interest and refuse to play like his little friends do! 

Sheesh!  I don’t mind being beaten by a child with many more hours experience at a given task, but being patronized by the Small Child?  Well this is a new and interesting development in our relationship.    😐
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We had what will no doubt be the first of many summer thunderstorms this afternoon.  When I was a kid they were regular as clock work.  Around 2.15pm the dark clouds would start to come over, by 2.30pm half the class would be continually glancing out the windows at the lightning and counting the seconds until the sound of thunder caught up.  By 2.55pm it’d be pissing down cats and dogs and school would let out at 3pm.  The kids who caught the bus used to make a dash across the quad to try and make it to their buses dry, the ones who got picked up would huddle under the awnings until they saw their ride turn up and my sisters and I used to try and run home from school in the middle of the thunderstorms through a park that rapidly became a three inch pond with hardly any trees arriving home soaked to the bone and laughing our collective arses off. 

If it was raining really heavily we’d get fairly saturated before barely making the school gate and we knew there was no point rushing home and getting in trouble for ruining our shoes any quicker so we’d sometime race leaf boats down the gutters and dwardle our way home.  That’s what little girls do when it’s raining cats and dogs out.

Today I discovered what little boys do.  When I went to pick up the Small Child this afternoon, he and two of his little mates were standing in the pouring rain seeing who could pee with greatest accurately into the storm drain.  Nice.

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