For the past couple of weekends, men in yellow ‘hi-vis’ jackets that appear from nowhere have been putting up bunting and signs around our village advertising the Carnival day. They pretty much shut the whole village down in terms of traffic, as the floats come all the way through from the middle, turn around and then go back to the furthest point from there, so everyone gets to see and hear it.

It’s always a really good carnival, lots of floats for a small village, Samba bands, bagpipes, dancers and so on.

Claire, Jack and I got all sun-creamed-up and set out literally at the top of our road to watch the carnival procession with a lot of our neighbours and friends from the village.

Part of the same day, is the Sports Day element, which we’ve never really attended as much, which is held on the big football field. As Claire’s not working Saturdays any more and Jack’s old enough, we’ve been asking him all week if he’d like to compete with our friend’s son, Kieran, in the running.

Now, I’ve not seen Kieran run until yesterday, but I have seen Jack run in short bursts, and thought it might have been an even contest, but Kieran (almost exactly the same age as Jack) is like a whippet in practise whilst we were waiting for the floats earlier in the day!

When it came to it, the Boys under 4 years event was filled with about 5 boys with a few mums/dads behind to make sure that they ran – myself and Adam (Kieran’s dad) included.

“Ready…”

By this point Jack’s got the idea on what to do, but wants to go now.

“Set..”

I’m having to hold him back at this point.

“GO!”

And they’re off. 5 flappy-paddle-feet kids are now running a short length of the field, and are probably doing so because their over-competitive parents are gunning heavily for them to win, without a clue as to why exactly they’re doing it.

Some of the older kids came in first, which was an obvious point. Whippet-Kieran was off and did well, I think. Jack would have been last if I weren’t behind him, but to be honest, I wasn’t racing, so yes, he was last, but he did really well!  I was really surprised that they both ran consistently for that length, keeping up the flat-out pace all the way, as normally, they’re running around the house to get something or someone, negotiating corners and toys that they’ve dumped there just moments ago.

And yes, I was both impressed and dead-proud at the same time. He got a medal for participating, which is good, but I’m sure that we’re now in training for next year’s event, so watch out Kieran!