Different day; different boy

After last week's catastrophic holiday club, I stayed home with my poppet on Friday, and to my immense surprise did in fact manage to get a couple of hours work done while he made a den (using every pillow, duvet and cushion in the house); built some lego and watched television. It felt like a major step forward, heralding the possibility that next summer we will be able to make more use of Working From Home and less use of Forking Out Huge Sums For Holiday Club. Not that there are that many aspects of building mass spectrometers that can be undertaken at home, but there's frequently a tedious manual that needs to be written, or something equally scintillating.

This week, we once again pieced things together with BigBear taking a day off, me taking a couple of days off and LittleBear being booked in for two days of holiday club.

I was not as worried about this as regular readers might suppose, given my ability to worry about anything and everything. Because, this is not any old holiday club, this is a football camp, run by the local professional football club. And if there is one thing that LittleBear loves more than he loves anything else, possibly even including his parents, is football. What is more, LittleBear's adored friend J was also going to said football camp. (My one bit of good holiday planning.)

I even made a plan with J's mother to attempt to arrive at the same time as each other, to avoid excessive distress and panic (I'm not sure whether J's mother suggested this to avoid distress and panic on my part, or on LittleBear's part, but it was kind of her either way.)

It turns out that synchronised arrival was unnecessary. LittleBear walked into the hall, saw J, and was off - running up and down, squealing with excitement, chasing the football, chasing J, utterly oblivious to me. I did get a goodbye, of sorts, and a cursory hug, but I was largely irrelevant within less than a second of arrival.

It's hard to believe he was the same boy as the one who was sobbing and clinging to me, begging me not to leave, less than a week ago...