Hanging out at the bar

Every week when Noah's quartet rehearses at the home of the 1st violinist, at break time my kids (Noah, plus Fiona, and occasionally Sophie has come along as well) gravitate to their doorway chin-up bar to play. A couple of times I'd asked where they'd got it, but I'd never managed to track one down, retail shopping not exactly being a simple prospect where we live.

This past weekend the 1st violinist and her mom made the 4-hour trip to a medium-sized city west of here. They came back with a thank-you gift for our family ... a thank-you to Noah for initiating the whole string quartet thing, to me for being coach and occasional taskmaster, and to Fiona for "hanging out and playing with" the 1st violinist's mom, who just happens to be one of Fiona's favourite people in the world, and mine too if truth be told.

And the gift was our very own chin-up bar! A perfect minimally-space-taking enticement to active indoor play through the kind of weather we're having now (slush / frost / rain / muck / heaps of wet dirty snow). Of course it's much more than a chin-up bar. It's a skin-the-cat bar, a swing, a feet-on-the-ceiling bar, a hang-from-your-knees bar, a run-and-jump bar, an inverted pretend tollbooth, you name it.

Hopefully none of the kids tear their arms out of their shoulder joints, what with all their upcoming music performances.