With this unseasonably warm (well, weird really) weather, we have felt that we should make the most of the warm afternoons. We dutifully planned a weekend trip to the park. It seemed such a good idea. Turns out it wasn't really.

After the obligatory search for the missing bike helmet and the loading of the bike rack, replete with bikes, we finally corralled the junior recipe testers and got them into the car. The senior recipe tester was performing the final bike stabilisation checks when there was an almighty shriek from the back seat of the car.

We rushed to the open car window. "Her tooth fell out!" reported the brother of the wailing junior. Now, it should be noted that a lost tooth has been longed for for about two and a half years. It's eventual exit from her mouth, we had assumed, would be a cause for celebration. It wasn't.

Once she was mopped up and spoken to in soothing tones, the immediate crisis appeared to be averted. Which lead to the second problem, "I dropped my tooth".

"It went down there," reported a helpful onlooker. This crisis necessitated a forensic dentistry investigation under the seat of the car. Fortunately it was successful. By the time we actually drove out of the driveway for the park the afternoon was almost over.

We arrived and unloaded the first bike. That's when the first accident occurred. A junior, pushing his bike up the gutter at the side of the road, tripped. He had moved perhaps twenty centimetres. His pedals had not yet completed one revolution.

The second incident involved the other bikes on the bike rack. The pedal of one had managed to thread itself through the spokes of another. Neither could be moved.

We abandoned the bikes.

Fortunately, we had purchased an ice-cream en route to the park to take the edge of the hole in mouth saga. Two juniors unwrapped and commenced licking. One junior unwrapped and howled at the sight of her icecream, fallen off the stick and now on the ground.

We abandoned the icecream.

The selected park has fantastic play equipment, which the juniors enthusiastically climbed. It has no comfort facilities. It wasn't long before the one junior who suffers the worst with stage fright announced that he needed to go.

We abandoned the park.