I’m convinced after today that my kids are somewhat different from other kids. I’d had always thought all kids loved crowds, carnivals and carousels. Not mine, apparently.

Fatherkao and I have an aversion to crowds and queues. As far as I can remember, we’ve never stood in a queue for anything for more than three minutes and generally avoided crowded places. We would never queue to eat at any restaurant or stand in line for a taxi. If we had to queue to pay for groceries at the supermarket, we’d rather put everything back and order stuff online. We don’t even queue to go to church. We just head straight to the Overflow Room. We don’t go to town and we don’t like waiting for a parking lot. We avoid the heartland malls in the weekends and find respite in the airport terminals where there’s plenty of space for the kids to run, lots of restaurants which we don’t need to queue to eat at, and GST-free shopping. We weren’t always like that, of course, but as we got older, we just felt that life is too short to be wasting time doing unproductive things like queuing up. If we needed to pay more to save on time, we would. If we had to queue to get something free, we’d rather not. Yes, not even if they were giving out free handphones and iPads. Or houses. Or cars. But I digress.

So it appears that our kids have taken after us in that way.

I won priority passes to the Drypers Little Day Out at East Coast from the giveaway at Daphne’s blog  and thought it would be nice to take the kids out to a carnival to have some fun before I officially start work on Monday. So when I told the kids that we would be going to a carnival, they were all yay and hooray; but when we arrived there, they started looking like the Grinch stole Christmas. They didn’t want to queue for the kiddy rides or the carnival games. At the bouncy castles, Ben asked me if I could make all the other children go away so he could play. They didn’t share the enthusiasm other kids had for chasing bubbles. They headed to find open spaces and stood there to watch the crowd, mostly for the one hour we were there. I actually had to tell Ben and Becks that we would go home if they continued to be so grumpy to get them to ride the carousel.

There you have it, signs of crowd aversion, just like their parents. I’m sure other kids had much fun, going on unlimited rides (they were free), playing carnival games, eating popcorn and cotton candy (they were free too), dancing with Alvin and the Chipmunks and watching the outdoor movie screening Chipwrecked.

Mine were just grouchy, until dinner time at a quiet restaurant. Only then were they back to their usual selves – when away from the crowd.