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My kids, as you'll have noticed are hilarious. Funnier than me. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident. It's fun being with them all day long where things veer from uncontrollable laughter to telling them off and back again, often both at once.
This morning at breakfast Ernie was making a lot of noise, which to be fair, is his job. I told him I would give him a billion pounds if he didn't say anything for ten hours. I confidently predicted he would last 30 seconds and I was right as he wanted to ask a question about the bet. I let him have another go and he was doing much better than I thought. When he got to 20 minutes I thought that I was about to bankrupt the family. He'd managed to win £100 by eating more sausages than I imagined he could eat, a few years ago,
Later, Ernie found out that his grandad had briefly required a wheelchair and not only that, the wheelchair was somewhere in the garage. He really wanted to see it and have a go, but it was in an inaccessible place and a bit dirty so he was told that he couldn't have it. He wasn't happy with this and kept asking. I thought it might be easier to let him have a go, but the decision had been made and we occasionally try to act like proper parents (one of us anyway) and stuck to our guns.
We'd sort of forgotten about the wheelchair by the afternoon when we went on a walk looking for leaves and pine cones for Halloween decorations. Ernie wasn't keen to come along and said that his knee hurt. He has been saying something along these lines for a while, but it hasn't been clear how or where he hurt it. He seemed to be walking fine, but was complaining about the pain. We stopped to look at the knee. It looked fine, but Ernie was almost in tears by now and we debated about going home or carrying on. I felt he was being overly dramatic, so we pushed on and the moaning continued. Were we the worst parents ever? Catie felt he was either in real trouble or pretending, but either way we should go home. I felt it was possible that the knee was hurting, but that there was nothing wrong. I felt he could walk it off. Especially if he was making it up.
But he stuck to his guns and was really crying by the time we got the rec and wouldn't go on any of the play equipment. It was raining, there were no pine cones, it was miserable and so we trudged home, Ernie still keeping up the act. So maybe it wasn't an act. Maybe he was going to lose a leg. And it'd all be my fault.
When we got back to my parents we were planning to go to the supermarket, but Ernie was going to stay at home. He then asked his grandad what they were going to do while we were out and made a show of thinking about it before idly suggesting they could have a look around the garage. He still hadn't forgotten the wheelchair. He was determined to get into that fucking wheelchair and I realised that the whole walk and the unexplained knee injury had been part of the long game to get him into it.
In fact his mum explained to him that he was definitely not going to get into the wheelchair and suddenly his leg seemed to be troubling him less.
What was impressive though is that he'd kept up the whole bad leg thing for that entire walk and cried real tears and refused to go on the playground equipment all for the wheelchair. Like we'd think, oh no Ernie can't really walk any more, what are we going to do? We could get that wheelchair out.
I was almost so impressed with his acting ability that I let him have a go in the wheelchair. There had been moments where we'd debated if we had to get him to a hospital. He's a proper Kaiser Soze.
Keep an eye out for this kid, he's either going to be a world class comedian or a notorious criminal. I suspect his first show will be about how his parents wouldn't let him go in a wheelchair when he didn't need to and the psychological damage that that did him.
