This is New Kid. He’s a boy and, added to our six-year old girl, he completes the set. Sadly, he has no beard – even at a week and a day, he’s already a disappointment to his father. Puberty seems a long way off but I suppose I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt until then. He’d better be bearded by thirteen or I’ll thunder about the house bellowing, “I have no son!”

I realise that none of you care a jot about the small, squealing progeny of random internet strangers like me but there’s an actual law that forces me to foist images and pointless information about my offspring on passers-by like you.

Sorry.

Incidentally, I mentioned it on The Twitter but he does look disconcertingly like Ray Winstone in this photo, doesn’t he? I’m considering a paternity test.

She’s referring to the numbers on the visitor’s map we used while rambling about.

She may be Rainman.

When she’s aggrieved about something – or possibly just stropy – she now walks really, really slowly. And, clever girl that she is, she tends to engage in this disruptive behaviour when we need to actually go somewhere – generally when we’re late.

I say, “Come on, we’ll be late…”

And she starts walking in tiny steps, an inch at a time.  She’s like a protesting taxi-driver or French trucker.

It’s both annoying and amusing at the same time.

When I threaten her, she says, “There are many causes that I am prepared to go to the naughty corner for but no causes for which I am prepared to put someone in the naughty corner.”

She may have been reading-up on this.

I have sent a strongly-worded letter to Ben Kingsley.

While I, obviously, enjoyed the time I spent with her, I always get anxious if I can’t get away to actually ‘do’ stuff and I was all too conscious that two and a half weeks had passed and I’d written very little.  Other than the I Sat Through That? columns for Flickering Myth, I did no writing at all.  This built and built and for the last few days I’ve actually been fidgety and restless.  I’d even go so far as to say twitchy – as if I’d drunk ten cans of Red Bull.

Part of me thinks that this is a good sign.  Another part of me worries that I may be a bit mental.

Probably the latter.

My daughter enjoyed it immensely though, and that’s all that’s important.

To be fair, other than daughter’s nosebleed, mid-ride, on some spinny thing (our slasher-movie, blood-stained clothes drew some interesting stares afterwards) it was a relatively incident-free trip .

I did notice some interesting tattoos, though. Disney ones. On adults. Who should really know better.

At breakfast, one day, I spotted a woman who had a young Lion King on her arm. Similar to this:

Later the same day, another woman, this time with a massive dragon tat all over her back.  She displayed it proudly.  It was pretty much the image below, minus the background.

Massive, it was.  Honestly.

I find it weird, but then the world confuses me pretty much all the time.

Yes, I’m off to Disneyland Paris.

Four glorious days of that rictus rodent gurning and waving with his podgy, gloved hands at me. Four days of Heston Blumenthal prices for sub-fairground fast food.  Four days of educationally sub-normal adults pushing kids out of the way so they can be in the front for the parade.  Four days of watching the characters’ cheeks twitch uncontrollably from being forced to constantly smile as they’re closely monitored by Disney security for the slightest deviation in ‘sunniness’.  Four days waiting, praying, for Cinderella to finally crack and go mental in a massive murder/suicide spree. At least it’d be a break in the trudging, monotonous, veneer of happiness thinly pasted onto a bundle of depressed, and depressing, fibre-glass structures in a gloomy, jaundiced, manufactured suburb of what is, otherwise, quite a nice city.

Four days. Expect me to come back with a substantially lighter wallet.  I’m guessing there is considerable expense involved in keeping Walt Disney’s head frozen and that’s the justification for the avaricious prices charged in, and around, the park.  Of course, I don’t mind paying for the ambience of a faux-jungle-hut or for the service-standards of those who know they have a captive audience- “Don’t like it? What you gonna do, queue for another fifty minutes over in Aladdin’s Pizza Palace? Ah haaa haaa haaaaa!”

Four days watching George Lucas, who, thanks to some sort of weird LucasFilms licensing thing, can often be seen standing by the shop selling bad copies of Indiana Jones hats or over at the X-Wing fighter, rubbing his hands in glee, only stopping to occasionally argue with a customer that Jar Jar Binks is a wonderful character and shout that, when the prequels are remastered, Binks will be, incongruously, CGIed into every single scene.

Four days of standing in lines, in the rain, for forty-five minutes for a forty-five second ride in a plastic, hollowed-out Dumbo.  Four days of the lifeless, insentient, and, yet, somehow malevolent eyes of the racist puppets in It’s A Small World After All (one of Walt’s personal favourites, apparently).

Four days.

God help me.

The jig’s up.  She might not be able to spell, but she knows that something’s going on and gets all watchful and sneaky.

A new system is required.  I’m for Pig-Latin.

Afty-cray ittle-lay rat-bay.  Ix-nay the elling-spay.  Oh, and op-pay the ettle-kay on.

The head, eerie and frightening enough on a normal day, recently received an application of face paints (the ones used to make kids look like tigers at fairs).  Daughter sat happily and carefully applied paints as I rustled up a nice Guinness and beef pie.  When she’d finished, she called me over for a look.

Gaah!  I mean, that’s beautiful.  Wow, she looks great.  Well done.  I, erm, have to check the dinner.

I backed away slowly, muttering prayers to the god I don’t believe exists.

Brilliant, honey.  Now, you clean dolly’s face and call me when it’s done.  Not before, ok.  When it’s all clean.

With closed eyes, I took a picture on my phone to prove it was real.

I see this in my nightmares.

She’s captured me, I think.  Incidentally, that huge arm is no accident.  She specifically pointed out that it was dad’s big arm.  I was under the impression that my arms were fairly similar in size but apparently not.  The reasons were explained to me:  that is the arm that she likes to cling to, arms and legs crossed around the forearm monkey-style, while I lift her in a sort of ‘biscep curl’ action.  I did it once when she was little and she still asks me to do it now and then.  It gets harder as she gets bigger and I get older.

Bloody kids.