The boys’s school term just ended on Friday (30th June), which means the start of awkwardly-scheduled summer camps, and / or needing to find alternate plans and entertainment for the boys.

It is over summer that I particularly appreciate the ‘4 Day Work Week’ that my current employer operates, and the fact that I generally have a considerable amount of flexibility at work.

On the last day of their school term when I had to pick them up at 11:45, I managed to squeeze in a visit to the osteopath for my right hip which has been aching for several weeks now. And then I brought the boys to Dopamine Land, which is a kind of multi-sensory experience for adults and older kids, where visitors go through rooms with different themes, mood / energy levels, and sensory experiences. It was actually very well-designed to tune our energy levels up and down, engage different senses, evoke different emotions, to manage our dopamine levels I suppose. But the boys were jumping around and playing excitedly in every room, completely disregarding the designers’ intentions. Haha.

I tried running around and telling them – look, here you’re supposed to be calm. Don’t you see the trees, doesn’t it make you calm? Look at the way they designed the light to cycle through a day to give the illusion of the passing of time – isn’t that so amazing? But nope, the kids were building a mountain of wood chips, or pushing the tree stumps around to design a more challenging parkour course. But at least we all had fun. Even though it was slightly exhausting at the end.

And today, we brought out their bikes for the first time this year (I think). After a wobbly start, Baby-O managed to cycle on his now-too-small bike. And they even roped me into playing some football.