It was Jack’s 3rd birthday the other week, and Claire and I had been discussing what to arrange for a party for him and some of his friends.

Claire had the idea of renting the swimming pool in Peterborough that she’s been taking him to for swimming lessons for the past 2 or 3 years, which is at the Calm-A-Baby swimming pool – a fantastic, heated swimming pool for children’s swimming lessons.

Calm-A-Baby are on Facebook too, which is here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Calm-a-Baby/58803121893

The pool itself is warm, so even new-born babies can use it, without fear of them turning blue and shivering after 20 minutes.

We booked the pool for the Sunday after his party, and had invited a gathering of friends and family to join us. The schedule was to have the pool, entirely, from 14:00 to 15:00, and then half an hour of ‘Wiggle and Jiggle’ to help further wear-out any kids that might still be awake after an hour long session in the pool.

Wiggle and Jiggle is another group-type meeting that Claire and Jack have been attending only recently, held at the same place as the pool, but in an upstairs room.  Sarah, who runs the group, gets the gathering of children and gets them to be manic, whilst still under control; in that, they’re allowed to make a mess with a pile of stuffed toys, musical instruments and singing and dancing and so forth. Basically, far too much exercise for my liking, but the kids love it.

In the pool, we had a few of Jack’s friends from various other baby groups that Claire and he have been going to, along with, of course, their mum and/or dad, some of our neighbours and their children of the same age, in addition to some family members too, so a great mix of people and children in all.

The hour seemed to flash by! Both Claire and I were in the pool, one of us with Jack and the other with Oliver. Strangely, both sets of Grandparents managed to forget their swimming costumes, but there’s always next time!

To start with, I had Jack with me and even though he’s been swimming and playing in the pool for a few years now, he’s still a little unsure about trusting himself, and seems to want to hang on to me. Whether he does this with his mum, I don’t know, but of course I don’t want him to go under either, and so I am happy to help him.  I was trying to get him to swim/float/flap-n-paddle by himself and after about 10 minutes or so, he did! Admittedly, he did have a ‘woggle’ with him, which is a long, cylindrical float-aide that is bendy and flexy, or yellow rubber-ring at times too.  With the woggle tucked under his armpits and me not too far away in front of him (i.e. arm’s reach!) he was doing it!! Well done little mate! #ProudMoment

Claire and I swapped, and I took the newborn(ish) nipper, Oliver, out for a paddle; by now Claire had got hold of Jack and was diving down from the surface and swimming under water with him holding the arms of her swimming costume, sitting on her back! The other kids took a turn on riding on Claire’s back and being thrust underwater and they all loved it! Glad we didn’t have to pay Claire too for her entertainment work too!

As I said, the hour literally flew by. Everyone loved it in there, especially me.

After the pool party, we had a short wait until Sarah started the Wiggle and Jiggle. Jack was obviously shattered as he had started to show off a little bit and pick and choose when he wanted to join in and follow instructions. He wasn’t too bad, but everyone else was a little better behaved, shall we say.

They all banged drums, crashed symbols or blew flutes in a big chaotic mess, whilst all parents looked on in deafened-horror. Again, the kids loved it and had a whale of a time throwing things up in the air, or dancing around and the like.  Of course, I would have loved to have joined in, but I was designated to be the official photographer, so I was stuck on the safe side of the lens.

After all of this, the children had cooked finger-food and cup-cakes (provided by Selina's Tea Rooms, part of the Calm-A-Baby venue), as well as birthday cake.

Jack. was. shattered. Unsurprisingly, he slept well that night. And so did Claire and I, with the exception of Oliver waking throughout the night!

The whole party was great and much fun was had by all. The pool is a great place for these parties and we’d hope that we’d do it again there another time.  There’s lots of ‘little moments’ that I’d like to share about the party, but to be honest, I don’t know where to start in listing them.

We took a whole load of photographs of the day and if they’re not available on Jack’s website, they will be shortly.  If you came and there’s any that you’d like on a disc, just let us know.  During the swim, my mum had my camera and was taking pool-side shots, which have come out very well. (Well done, Granny Rigby!)

Jack: “Dad.” 

Jack: “Daaaad.”

Jack: “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.”

Daddy: “What’s up, little man? It’s getting late – you should be asleep.”

Jack: “Dad…”, holding his knee with cupped hands.

Daddy: “What’s the matter? It’s late, you need to go to sleep.”

Jack: “My elbow hurts.”

Daddy: (smiling) “That’s not your elbow. Go to bed.”

Jack: “Dad! My elbow hurts.”

Daddy: “That’s not your elbow. Now come on, go to bed.”

Jack: “Where is my elbow?”

Daddy: “Here’s your elbow. Bed.”

Jack: holding his elbow and rubbing it… “Daaaad……”

Daddy: “Jaaaaaaaaack…”

…

…

Jack: “My elbow hurts.”

When Jack was under-construction, en-womb, I applied a little computer ‘geekness’ to it all and assigned a code-name for the new project, which was that of ‘Juniper’.  The name itself was always intended to be non-gender specific, as at the time, we didn’t know whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

This was always planned on being a gender in-specific name that we could use rather than ‘the baby’, or more to my dislike, just merely ‘baby’ which is how the nurses, midwives, etc all refer to a unborn child, which, to me being a newbie around babies, always felt a little… strange.

So, moving onto the new little Riggers in production, between creative-Claire and I, we’ve mustered up the codename of ‘Jester’ for the new sprog, which will be his project name until birth where he’ll be assigned a name for life, this time of my picking. (Again, evil laugh).

So, yes. Jester.

Why Jester? Well, Claire’s sums show that as the baby is due in January 2012, counting back 9 months means that Claire and I must have ‘gotten jiggy-wid-it’ in April. To me, April is a fairly flat and boring month and the only memorable thing in April is April Fools. April Fools turns into Fools, and Fools leads my little mind on into ‘Jester’. Jester, to me, isn’t really a boy’s name nor a girl’s name, and it starts with the same initial letter as Juniper. Spurious, nonetheless, but…!

And we couldn’t think of anything better. Which is a much better reason. So, Jester it is really. A name until we decide on… a name!

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!