They had a great disappointment two weeks ago – a new mutual friend sent an official looking invitation to her birthday tea – neatly written out and looking most ‘properly done’. Luckily, I took them and went in to see the mother – who knew nothing about it (the birthday in question being months away). However, the pair of them were surprisingly grown up about the whole thing (i.e. they didn’t burst into tears till they were out of sight of the house). The child had even been given two presents by friends who were unable to come, which she had hidden in her room. The poor mother was so embarrassed!
A v v odd thing happened to me last week: the phone went and an odd voice assured me I’d won the lottery. I’ve never bought a ticket and I said they had the wrong number. They quoted the right phone number and said, ‘then it must be you – you silly old goat’. If I’d had a ticket, you can imagine how disappointed I’d have been, a mean trick.
X had given the boys a gorgeous length of yellow nylon rope – thick enough to tow a car, and hopefully too thick for them strangle each other. Y took charge of this, tied Z on the other end of it and started a bit of mountaineering up the bank at one end of the playground – ending up ten minutes later with poor Z more or less strung up, lying on his back with the rope round his legs preventing him from getting up again, as it was up round a tree and Y’s weight on the other end. However, we managed to avert panic by talking fast and telling him how well he had managed the rope, and how it had stopped him falling all the way down and what a good rope it was – all of which he accepted after a time! [And from another account] We took the boys down to the park where Y and Z managed to get themselves tangled up with a rope and a tree and a bank – all upside-down. By great reliance on the inability of a 3-year-old for logical thought we persuaded them it was terribly lucky they had the rope since they’d have fallen down the bank otherwise (the fact they’d never have got tangled up didn’t come into it!)
Filed words 