Day 6: Excitement Management

Today I had an interesting chat with Teddy on the climbing frame. We discussed how odd it is that Otter Keeper isn’t more excited about having his birthday in only a few days time! I do know that birthdays are more exciting for smaller people, but still, his birthday is REALLY close now.

Personally, I get much more excited about birthdays. Last year when it was almost my birthday, I had to spend most of my time under the sofa pillow in order to stay calm. Otter Keeper got annoyed with me for messing up the sofa and that was when he came up with my ‘excitement management’  technique. It’s a really good technique and I’ve used it ever since.

It really works, and the best bit is that marking household objects can actually be really unexpectedly interesting and fun. Even if you don’t have excitement issues, I still recommend marking your household objects when you get the chance. It’s good information to have on hand. What if you had visitors and they asked which was your favourite: The skirting board or your wellie? I don’t need to tell you how awkward everyone would feel if you didn’t know the answer.

Once you’ve marked all the objects in your house, you can just start again from the beginning. This is OK because your feelings for household objects can change over time. It’s perfectly normal to change your mind, and it is actually why someone invented Ebay! Here are some of my favourite things I have marked out of 10. (Please note: This diagram is slightly out of date because my toothbrush went up to a 5 last week.)

Anyway, I spent most of today working on Otter Keeper’s birthday present and card. I’m going to make sure Otter Keeper has the best birthday EVER!

Oh, and if you were wondering about the fish finger experiment: To cut a long story short, my fish finger rehabilitation program no longer exists. This is mainly because my fish finger family gave up straight away and just sort of disintegrated and floated about a bit. Trying to encourage them to swim by splashing the bath water just made the situation worse. I did everything I could, but then Otter Keeper showed up and made his thoughts on marine life in our bath quite clear. Me and the team got into trouble (unfair) and I had to do a lot of tidying up (also unfair).

So, I found out two things. Being a marine biologist is harder than it looks, and It’s actually impossible to release Fish Fingers back into the wild because they are just not interested.