Another lovely day with my wonderful granddaughter Catrin
Yesterday I spent all day with my granddaughter Catrin (now just one month short of her third birthday) who was allowed to miss nursery to go out with the me.
The starting point was a stage show at the Leicester Square Theatre to see “Stick Man”. Catrin has already seen two stage productions with other relatives this Christmas – one with Peppa Pig and the other with the Gruffalo – and she loves them. In our case. it has hard to be sure which was opened wider: her eyes or her mouth. She delighted in all the opportunities to shout out and granddad enjoyed the jokes (“Why is the sea wet?” “Because the sea weed.”).
Then we teamed up with my friend Jen and her son James who is just three months older than Catrin. The kids have met several times and, when they saw each other again, they ran together and hugged each other. After some lunch at “Gaby’s”, we strolled down to Trafalgar Square to see what we described as “the biggest Christmas tree in the world”. Then we wandered round to Leicester Square – Catrin and James holding hands – where there is a Christmas fair. First Catrin & James rode a small vehicle on a tracked journey and then Jen & I took them on a merry-go-round.
Next Jen and I chanced our luck and took the little ones to their first ever film. The venue was the West End Vue and the movie was the latest Walt Disney production “Frozen” [my review here]. They sat through all 102 minutes utterly enraptured. James and then Catrin took turns sitting on my knee. Little James jumped whenever there was a loud event; after each set back for the heroine, Catrin would say: “Oh, dear!” At the end, James burst into tears. When I asked Jen why, she told me that he didn’t want the film to end. When I explained this to Catrin, she burst into tears too and insisted she didn’t want it to end either.
Finally we returned to the Leicester Square fair for a couple of more rides. This ended a full but fun day. Not sure who had the most fun through: Jen and me or the children.
Footnote: The first time that I took my son Richard – Catrin’s daddy – to the cinema was when he was just two and a half. We saw “Star Wars”. What an introduction to the movies.