the adlards

What do you think of courtesy cars? Does it count as a courtesy car if it’s grubby, the seats feel as though they’ve had a succession of greasy 100 stone men abusing them, and four of you feel like you could only get in or out with a crowbar even though two of you are infants and the other two are SHORT?

Jo and I took the car in today because it had told us “oil gauge fault return to dealer”. Nice descriptive error I thought. Apparently not. I’m led to believe that, when asked about it today, the onboard computer had completely forgotten ever having even thought of the error. They assured me they’d restarted the computer. I asked if they’d switched it into verbose mode. They looked at me blankly.

So baby started on her first outing today in a dirty, grey Punto with bright yellow advertising plastered all over it, no air-conditioning and a fuel tank that went from empty to half-full for a tenner. We loaded ourselves in, having removed the tray over the boot space to fit the stroller in, and headed off to Josie’s toddler group.

This is the group that went to antenatal classes together before Josie was born and still meet up every week. I get to see them perhaps twice a year – Christmas and birthdays – so it was a treat to be able to go along today. I particularly enjoy watching Jo interact with the other kids. They’re at various stages of learning to speak, but it’s amazing to see how effectively they’re able to communicate with each other in play despite their differences. Of course once we’d introduced a little birthday party sugar into the mix (they’re all turning 2 around now), social etiquette took something of a back seat, giving way to pure power and speed. Josie was definitely out in front of the pack in the dash-madly-across-the-room-and-throw-yourself-wildly-against-the-wall game they were playing.

Baby was cuddled and held and loved by all, and Michelle had some good chatting time. It was a great afternoon. There are some pics in the gallery.

Thanks to all who’ve responded to the “noisies problem“. Amid much typographic shrugging of shoulders there was some excellent advice and information, most notably from Tim H.

No name for baby yet despite the best efforts of those of you who’ve been offering such useful advice (notably Mr Midgley). Oddly enough, this state of affairs doesn’t seem to be distressing her at all … probably because I haven’t shared all the suggestions with her.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 10:19 pm by james and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.