On Saturday I took Little Fink, Master and Miss Glum and J to the Dome for the Festival of Scouting, the culmination of the Centenary of Scouting. It was a 3 hour exhibition of the innovation and myriad skills of the young people that make up the Scouting community.
On a lighter note - it was 15,000 people involved in Scouting, enjoying a whole evening's entertainment. Brilliant.
The children were well behaved (and a joy to be with) and just as well, I was terrified of loosing them. As we approached the Dome on foot and stood marvelling at the Dome and it's surrounding sculptures, Little Fink piped up, "We've lost J, he's gone"
Argh, we hadn't even gone inside yet. I looked round in the low key panic mode us mum's go into. After 30 agonising seconds Little Fink said, "Ha ha got you, he's here really". he had been hiding behind me the whole time.
I calmly (I thought - considering) asked them to look at my face and tell me if I looked like I thought it was a good joke. We all agreed not to play that little joke again!
The place was packed solid, we moved along in a hand holding chain and checked out the ground floor, after a while we needed to find a toilet before the show.
There is only one set of toilets on the main ground floor of the Dome! The queue was back out onto the main corridor. Again the feelings of minor panic were setting in. The kids have to sit for 3 hours, they need to go to the loo before we go in. The worst case scenario was we would have to take them outside and go al fresco but the fight to get through the crowds made this idea seems almost impossible too. Mrs Coulthard said, "I just heard someone say there are toilets in the cinema". We rounded up the troops (3 women and 6 children) and legged it up the stairs. We asked the man on the door, could the children go to the loo. "No, we had hundreds of people in here this morning trying to use the toilets, I'm not starting it this afternoon".
I begged and pleaded with him just to let the children through and when that didn't work I asked if the manager could come down. When he arrived I stated my case again. I couldn't see a was of getting this problem sorted out and my voice started to crack with emotion/panic.
The manager must have thought I was going to cry or something so he let us through, on the proviso that we didn't tell anyone we had been allowed through! The things we do for our children?
