1.  Scrappy Doo

2.  Scooby Doo

3.  Scoopy Poo

Yesterday’s marathon gave me an afternoon off, and I took Son 1 aged 4y 10m to see Scooby Doo and the Pirates in The Big City.  I felt desperately guilty about Son 2 aged 22m… when I booked the tickets last October he was 13m old. Couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything.  Now he thinks he’s 4, loves Scooby Doo and can point him out on a poster, loves Pirates (”Arrrr!” and “Hook!”) and would have been devastated if any of us had admitted he was being left behind. Instead we pretended that I was taking Son 1 to school, and Wonder Nanny engineered things so Son 2 was asleep when I swooped in and out to collect him.

Great show and a great time.  Just as I fell in love with Anthony during The Wiggles, there is now Something There That Wasn’t There Before with Shaggy.  He’s happy and kind,  he loves animals and dancing and he adores food. We were in the second row. Son 1 kept hiding under the chairs of the front row when the pirates came out.  He seems so big when we’re with Son 2, but on his own, in a theatre with 2000 people he seemed tiny. “I know who the pirate queen is Mummy, the  lady who likes chocolate in the first bit.” 

“Do you need the loo?” I asked before we left the theatre. “No,” he answered crossly, as he always does. Then, two miles into the 70-mile trip home “I need a poo!”  “Can you wait a bit?” “No! It’s coming!”  We stopped in a supermarket car park.  Lidl and the Co-op. Not a loo between them. We asked in a community centre. No, the loos couldn’t be opened.  It rained.  I fished in my hessian shopping bag.  A printed out email from The Office and a handful of napkins.  I perched Son 1 in a corner by a hedge. “Have a wee and then go on that.”  He obliged.  I picked up the Matter.  And that is how I came to be walking around a shopping centre with a rolled-up email filled with poo in one hand and a four year old’s grasp in the other.  I found a lined bin and got rid of it.  Pre-children, pre-swine flu, I didn’t even know you could get small bottles of antiseptic hand gel. But as it happened, I had one in the car.   I cleaned my hands. “Wash your hands with this,” I handed the bottle to Son 1.  His small voice came from the back. “Oh. Missed.  It’s gone everywhere.”