So
I may have made a seemingly minor mistake a short while ago that is now coming back to bite me on the behind. When my son was falling asleep the other night I was telling him a ‘bedtime story’. I’ve put that in quotations because, after reading him the actual story from start to finish, he wanted me to keep going so I just started making things up. Nonsense mainly. This is a pretty standard practice in our household and I usually don’t think anything of it, except that he latched onto one, relatively minor detail, when I thought he was pretty much asleep and now he’s become kind of obsessed with it.
From what I remember (hey, I was tired too) I may have told him penguins lived in Melbourne ice skating rinks. On the scale of story telling to lying, I feel like it’s pretty obvious where that tale stands, but unfortunately it’s not so clear for Tim. When he woke up in the morning I was totally unprepared for the excitement surrounding going ice skating. Usually when he wakes up he doesn’t remember the stories at all! Why did this one have to be different?
All of this is magnified tenfold by the unhelpful fact that we promised him he could have his birthday party anywhere and now he’s desperate to go ice skating. Have you ever tried organising birthday party venues last minute? It’s pretty much impossible. Everywhere requires a certain amount of notice that we didn’t give. In fact, since the offer for Tim to have his party anywhere has been open for months, we’d just assumed we were going to have it here. I’d even started organising all the decorations and everything like that. This has just gone and thrown a huge spanner in the works. It’s okay though. Finding an ice skating rink that’s still available is going to be way easier than convincing Tim penguins don’t live there.