Zoo and Party

Posted on 2016/02/03 22:11:25 (February 2016).

[Sunday 31st January 2016]
Since spending New Year's Eve in the sole company of Erika, when it occurred to me how meaningless that must have been for her given she has no real concept of any unit of time much greater than a day, I've been keenly observing how her grasp of time is subtly but slowly changing. For a while now she'd routinely ask first thing in the morning what we're doing today, which had then gradually turned into asking the night before what the plan was for tomorrow, and from there (often when the initial answer is unsatisfactory to her) she'll then see what's on the horizon for the next few days. Although that said she hasn't yet entirely pinned down all the different names of the days of the week, so sometimes on, say, a Monday, she'll ask "What are we doing today?", followed not unreasonably by "What are we doing tomorrow?", but then slightly more surprisingly "...and what are we doing on Friday?".

It's a bit disappointing that most of the time I have to tell her I'm going to work, even though at the moment she only goes to nursery two days a week, so actually five out of seven days a week she spends the whole day with at least from one parent, and I am back in time for us all to have dinner together almost every evening which is much better than many Dads.

Still, I think this may be part of the reason we end up going to the zoo so much. I don't tend to do much planning in advance, on weekends I would naturally just wake up in the morning and see how the mood takes me, but Erika seems to like to book in a visit to the zoo, maybe just so she has a guarantee we'll be spending time together.

So that's what we did this morning. It was quite a rainy Sunday morning, and I didn't think a visit to the zoo would be a great success, but somehow we managed to have a nice time regardless. She's normally not that keen on going to the aquarium (I don't think she likes the lighting) but I managed to persuade her to spend a bit longer than usual in there, after which she seemed very keen to see jellyfish for some reason, which for some reason are in the building where the bugs are, so that was another indoor thing. That plus a bit of the usual "animals in action" show (fortunately held in a marquee), a ride on the carousel (choosing one of the drier horses on the inside) and then a wander round the shop and lunch in the cafe, seemed to add up to a satisfactory visit to the zoo without getting too wet in the process.

We headed back home after that, but then went almost straight back out again, as Erika had been invited to the birthday party of one of her friends from nursery. I had assumed Chie would be coming along to that as well, but apparently some sort of miscommunication took place and so I ended up taking Erika by myself. I had some predictable conversations with the other parents which at times veered inexorably toward the usual banal subjects like schools and housing, but other than that it was all quite pleasant. The entertainer was gratifyingly oddball (wearing more or less a tweed suit), and overall Erika seemed to have a nice time.

Back at home in the evening I decided to make a roast dinner of sorts - with individual toad in the holes (small Yorkshire puddings each with half a Quorn sausage in, which worked surprisingly well) and some roast potatoes which weren't as good as I wanted them to be, as always. Erika seems to really like Yorkshire puddings and enthusiastically put three on her plate, and, to my delight, polished them all off.

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