Skaterboy

"What's wrong with you?" Tracey asked me this morning.

I was limping and moaning quietly (just quietly enough for her to hear) whenever my foot hit the ground.

"Sports injury," I told her.

She wasn't the first person I'd told either. Her mother, her father, her sister, our oldest two kids - they'd all heard how I was suffering and how the top of my foot was aching.

"What sport?" she wanted to know. I don't blame her for asking. The only sport I seem to be involved in lately is sexercise.

It's not unusual for Christmas at the Devereauxs to leave a house full of happy and exhausted children, and one injured parent, in its wake.

Usually my Christmas injuries are the result of opening toys heat locked in plastic which requires a mig welder, engineers degree and two teams of opposing horses to remove, or gashes to my fingers from sharp edged cardboard boxes. I inevitably end up bleeding on something, and then sport cuts and scabs on my fingers well into the new year. Plus, you know it's not easy to maintain a rugged, fatherly, testosterone fueled persona when you're squealing 'ouch' and then sucking on your finger because of a paper cut.

This year, however, I must say I've been impressed with the step down from Fort Knox toy packaging security has taken. Most of the toys displayed in boxes were held in place by string and either easily cut or untied. The powers that be must have been listening to my screamed demands every Christmas morning since the late nineties to have this travesty fixed.

Unfortunately, though, while I didn't slice and dice my fingers this year, I did sustain a foot injury from one of my kids' toys.

I limped some more and hissed in pain as I gathered my strength to say another sentence to my wife: she almost waited patiently for me to speak. "From when I went all skaterboy yesterday," I grimaced at her.

Tracey looked at me incredulously, then snort chuckled. "Skaterboy?" The complete lack of sympathy etched into her face was almost as painful as my foot. When that look did finally leave her face it was only so it could be replaced by another which told me how pathetic I am. "You mean the two laps of the balcony you did on the princess scooter Santa gave the girls?"

I stand corrected, there have been two injuries this Christmas, but only one of them is physical.

I'm just glad Tracey wasn't within earshot when I was telling my story to her mother.

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