A
summer saturday
15 January, 2000
Well, I bought a baby seat for the bike. Me and Matty hit the bike shop this morning. He loved it there, wandering all over the shop, touching things, telling me whenever he found a wheel (two on each bike, probably 70 bikes in the shop — a lot of wheels), and just having a ball. Purely by chance they had a sale on bike seats, so I got it for well under 1/2 price. We picked out a helmet for Matty, in suitably garish colours. Deb wasn't impressed. But then she's a Mum.
I spent a couple of hours almost putting my bike back together and almost attaching the seat to it. I forget how to do things, so I have to make the same mistakes once more, before I remember what to do. I get there in the end, just my end may be a bit longer than some other's. I'll finish it off tomorrow and we'll try it out.
After lunch, and I swear this is what we did for kicks, we took Matthew to a hire place so he could look at the diggers there. He's got an obsession with diggers. Two of his favourite books centre around the exploits of diggers — "The little yellow digger" and "Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel". So, after explaining to the manager why we were there with our 19 month old son, we had a great time, wandering about all the various diggers, climbing in and out of them, marvelling at the different sized digging implements they used. The guy at the hire shop said, "oh, lots of Dads bring their sons here to look at the diggers."
After that we strolled along the water front for a while. We just let Matty go where he wanted, so it was slow and somewhat random progress. After a while he just looked up at Deb, said, "bah" and lay down in the middle of the footpath, resting his head on the ground. We took it to mean he was tired!
We came home and set up the paddling pool, and Matthew had lots of fun splashing and peeing in it. It's just a tiny, blow-up one, but it does the trick. Dinner was fish and chips and beer.
It's been a lovely day. There's even a couple more photos up in my pictures section.