Richard Hearn is engaged in fowl play

Recently I took The Boy and Youngest™ to the Wildfowl and Wetlands centre near Arundel. This is the kind of thing I look for as a parent – the heady mixture of outdoor space, a café and some kind of creatures (in addition to The Boy and Youngest™, of course.) If the elements are all in place, it’s a kind of parenting alchemy, creating gold dust on a Sunday.

“It’s a kind of parenting alchemy, creating gold dust on a Sunday”

Over time, The Boy has really become interested in animals, and his knowledge has now surpassed mine by some distance. (OK, that may not be saying much, but I do consider myself a curious amateur.) He knows not just the species but the sub-species (I think that includes the italics too) on the button. (No, that doesn‘t make sense to me, either.)

Anyway, it was a very enjoyable day with a few traditional parenting moments. Let’s list these: the frantic distribution of the supplied food for the creatures (in this case, ducks) resulting, surely, in an avian obesity epidemic; a photo of The Boy and Youngest™ eating ice cream in a picturesque setting; some incongruous play-acting done in front of an unlikely audience, in this instance Being Ninjas In Front of Ducks, which may well be The Boy’s autobiography title; and myself getting almost stuck in a play area setting.

Let’s expand on that last one. There are moments when I’m called up to rescue Youngest™ from a play area and, while seemingly trapped, the concept of a valve comes to mind. There’s a way in but there’s no way out. And so it was, that I wondered whether a perfect storm of my own size and degree of flexibility in conjunction with a child-sized hole meant I‘d created my own final prison. Perhaps I would be found much later, when a plaque ‘It’s what he – and others – would have wanted’ would get screwed on.

There were also two ‘water-based’ moments. The first, a boat ride, seemed the most likely to cause parenting-related stress, based on previous arguments about where everyone should sit, but instead was a pleasurable and educational trip. The more stressful episode was the ‘Pond Adventure’ mainly because they were both getting tired and the act of arcing a wet net on the end of a stick successfully without soaking your brother or knocking them in the water seemed doomed. At one point I thought The Boy’s last words would be ‘That’s a Water Boatman’.

But it was fine. Fittingly, his younger brother caught a Lesser Water Boatman (oh, the circle of life), and we got to put them on a magnifying lazy susan that I’ve only previously seen in The Booth Museum.
Anyway, a great day, as I’m sure I’ve managed to successfully convey.

Illustration: Paul Lewis www.pointlessrhino.com