Our local Market town, Malton, occasionally mentioned in Downton Abbey TV stories. There has been a town here ever since the Romans decided to build a fort here one day. Could have found somewhere a tad warmer….

Just down from this bridge is a small children’s play barn. One of those places that goes through repeated name changes but nothing ever changes inside. It’s a site of much parenting inspiration for me.

The play barn is really tight inside and the owners somehow squeezed in an even tighter adventure climbing maze. The kinda maze that every few minutes a young child loses confidence and cries out for a parent to rescue them. Mums often heading into the maze to make the save, Dads often opting for a non intervention, low risk strategy. Declining to enter the maze, just shouting and pointing approach from a safe distance.

On one trip years back, when Hawklad was a toddler, he went climbing there. Yep he got stuck. As much shouting and pointing as I tried, Hawklad remained stuck. Time to face my mini Dantes Inferno, I had to go in. Uncomfortably claustrophobic, having to climb over toddlers with the bite strength of an African Crocodile. Eventually I made it to where Hawklad had been. Now he was outside, giggling, watching his Dad go through this instrument of torture. I had been done like a kipper…..

But then the parenting inspiration after being the butt of the joke…..

A few minutes later, a toddler properly stuck and needing help. Eventually a rather exasperated Dad decided he had to go in….. I’m no Thor but this Dad was even less of a Thor. Well actually he was way bigger than Three Thors round the belly region…. Seeing this poor Dad get slower and increasingly more stuck was strangely fascinating. The inevitable eventually happened, Dad got stuck. Properly wedged in. His toddler now filled with renewed courage and unable to turn down this unique opportunity to inflict torture, he came in for the kill. Toddler made it to his stuck Dad and started to draw random patterns on his Dad’s bald head with chalk and non marking pens. Other parents now gleefully supplying more and more ammo for this unrelenting assault. Dad unable to move his hands so unable to offer any defence to this unprovoked attack. Finally the Barn owners dismantled part of the maze to free this poor, broken colouring book of a parent.

What’s the patenting inspiration from this….. as bad as things have got for me, and they have frequently been very embarrassing. It’s never ever got close to being as bad as it got for this poor, randomly tattooed Dad. A Dad whose only crime was to CARE…..

31 thoughts on “Care”

  10. I sympathise. There should be a law about the size of these things. I once got stuck in the replica mine in the Lead Mining Museum at Matlock Bath. It still brings back unpleasant memories. Some of us are just not built for small spaces.

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