Yesterday promised to be a little bit different; a bit of a change to shake things up. A friend, who lives about three hours away wanted to come and have a catch up and it’d been a fair while since I’d last seen him. It was back in June in fact when I had visited his home.

My older boy was in pre-school although the younger one is off sick from nursery. With this in mind I did offer to cancel, before my friend had bought the train tickets, but MamaRah very kindly agreed that I could go ahead as planned and I rejigged my day accordingly.

And so after dropping the older one off and running just one client session I set off for the city centre and met my friend as planned. First, we went for coffee and had a good catch up before moving on to have lunch in a nearby restaurant. It was promising to be a nice and relaxing day. My friend always understood that I would have to leave mid-afternoon as I had a late afternoon session which I didn’t want to cancel.

Then, just as I had finished eating and had paid the bill, I got a phone call from my mother-in-law and I immediately realised that we were in imminent danger of an impending catastrophe.

The baby, now two years old, had locked MamaRah on the balcony by firstly pushing it, too and then pulling the handle half way down.

He was locked inside and she was locked outside and there was nothing she could do about it. To make things even worse, MamaRah had left some pasta cooking on the hob. She didn’t even have her phone with her.

The little one is an adventurer and a climber and the potential for disaster was very high.

Fortunately, MamaRah was able to get the attention of a neighbour and she gave her mum’s number to her and that was when my mother-in-law in turn called me.

I quickly left the restaurant knowing I needed to get home as soon as I could and my first port of call was a taxi from the front of a nearby hotel, but there weren’t any there and then a bus that could get me close came along even though it wasn’t the perfect one. So I just jumped on it. I had no time to procrastinate and any delay in waiting for a taxi after calling for one meant the bus was actually the better option. I had gone a few stops and then I saw coming up behind the perfect and most direct bus to my district even though it wouldn’t take me to the nearest bus stop to my home. I think a kindly stranger must have seen the stress on my face and he asked if he could help. Of course, he was as powerless as me, but at least his gesture was appreciated.

So I quickly switched. Then I got off and was hoping another bus would come just to carry me the last two stops and indeed it did. From the final stop it was a further three or four minute walk although with me running I did it somewhat faster.

Fortunately, I arrived home to see the little one looking out of the balcony door at his mum no worse for the experience. MamaRah of course was a different matter and even though it was only a matter of seconds for me to open the door I could see how stressed she was.

She scooped the little one up and ran to the kitchen to turn off the pasta which had almost boiled dry.

No harm came as a result of what happened, but it does leave us with a lot of ifs and maybes, but it is best not to dwell on them because each potential scenario only gets worse as the mind tends to spiral.

It took me about 25 minutes to get home from the phone call to the door and almost certainly the worst would have been if he had badly hurt himself while I was still en route and MamaRah would have been powerless to do anything about - fortunately nothing like that happened.

While it was a minor thing, in the end I only lost about 10-15 minutes with my friend as I was having to head home anyway.

A very different day.

As always stay safe and well my friends.