This Summer was the Summer of the Scooter – my two played out on theirs every minute that they could, as did all the other kids in the neighbourhood who all have the same type of scooter incidentally). They put them in the boot of the car and took them everywhere we went and got them out at every opportunity for a quick scoot around and whenever we had some sun, we packed them up in the car and went to play with them at the beach as the kids love scooting down the ramp that the fishing boats use to get down to the beach.
So you can see why I thought that a trip to the local skate park would be an enjoyable experience for them can’t you?
How wrong was I? We paid our £5.00 each for two hours play on the ramps and I went to watch them have their first few gos on the baby ramps before I planned to settle in to the cafe and read a trashy magazine in peace (well as peaceful as it gets in the middle of a skate park).
Miss Frugal was away with it straight away and loved it from the first time she had a go but seeing as Master Frugal is not the bravest child in the world, he struggled a bit even on the smaller ramps at first and was really nervous when it came to launching himself of the top of them.
After about ten minutes, he kind of got the hang of it and you could see his confidence growing every time he had another go so I decided to go and settle myself in the cafe with my magazine and a cuppa. I’d just got myself settled in when I looked up and saw him at the top of the biggest ramp in there, poised ready to launch himself off it.
How he went from the tiny ramp to the ten foot one in the space of fifteen minutes, I have no idea but he didn’t hear me shout and I couldn’t get to him quick enough to stop him, so down he came…. He managed to stay on his scooter all the way to the bottom of the ramp, he even managed to stay on it as he zoomed across the floor at the bottom of the ramp and he even managed not to get hit by all the scooters and BMX Bikes that he was cutting up as he zoomed along, so scared that he just forgot to brake but he didn’t managed to stay on when he hit the side of another ramp and he ended up in a heap on the floor about fifty feet from the ramp he’d just been down.
I know I shouldn’t laugh but if you could have heard him you would too, he wasn’t crying much – he was too busy shouting that he’d broke his back. Then when he got up he started to scream that he’d broke his legs and his arms and then, just when you thought there wasn’t much else to break, he decided that he’d broke his chest because he couldn’t breathe properly (possibly because of all of his dramatics!).
After he’d finally stopped feeling sorry for himself, he refused to go on anything else and even the promise of a slush puppy couldn’t persuade him otherwise so he ended up sitting with me for the other hour and forty minutes while Miss Frugal, who was the only girl in there showed the boys how it should be done 😉
So, the moral of this story is to remember that just because your children like playing on their scooters riding up and down ramps, it is not necessarily a good thing to take them and their scooters to a place filled with ramps!
How hard is this parenting lark?
