Scenes from this year’s Gingerbread Olympics, taking place in our dining room, just after tea. First the swimming event, then the diving.
Archive for February, 2007
We had a surprising update yesterday to the Slow to Zoom system. It turns out there is a speed even faster than Zoom, known as A1. This in turn is outstripped by B2, then C3 and so on, right up to the frankly interstellar… Z26.
All of this is pure theoretical physics, of course. I’m not convinced we’ve ever seen Zoom in our house, let alone A1. Hearing Hannah and Lauren talk about Z26 is like listening to Stephen Hawking on black holes: it all sounds very clever but you can’t quite imagine what it would actually look like.
I can only suppose it would be a bit like “VOOM” in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back: a tremendous release of energy, a blinding flash of light, and a fraction of a second later two girls would be standing there in their school uniforms, hair combed, shoes done up, coats on.
I can’t deny it sounds attractive, but their current method (lying on back, singing, reading, waving legs in air) probably causes less structural damage.
This, as you can undoubtedly tell, is Hannah’s sound picture:
Click on it for the full story!
The girls got recorders for Christmas. They’re both downstairs abusing them now.
So far they have only learnt one note: that piercing one you get when you blow too hard with all holes uncovered.
Shriek! Shriek! Shriek-shriek-shriek!
Mike Oldfield this ain’t. I am approaching the point of despair.
A word from the wise: if your children ever come into posession of recorders, buy ear muffs or leave home.
Hannah and Lauren revealed an amazing secret to me today: their five-level heirarchy of Getting Dressed Speeds. Ranked in order, these are:
- Slow
- Wide
- Fast
- Smart
- Zoom
Rather than defining each one precisely the girls offered rather scattered titbits of information, a bit like one of those logic puzzles where you get mismatching information about a range of items and have to work out the rest. What I now know is the following:
- Wide is really slow, y’know, a bit dawdle-donkey, like with messing about and stuff.
- Slow is just lying on the floor daydreaming.
- Zoom is the fastest, where you just get dressed and no talking.
- Smart is faster than Fast but you’re allowed a bit of talking.
- Fast is what they normally do. (Note: I would never have chosen the word “fast” to describe it.)
- If you want to go to disco dancing after school on a Friday you have to do Zoom or Smart.
- This morning Lauren did Zoom but there is some disagreement over whether Hannah did Zoom or Smart.
- I definitely heard both of them talking.
- The whole system therefore appears dangerously corrupt.
Don’t tell them, but they’re going disco dancing anyway. It buys us a whole hour of peace and quiet.