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Today the Wife and I took the Kids over to the brother-in-law's house for lunch. It was a lovely afternoon, we all coo-ed and ahh-ed over the new niece again. The Boy, the Girl and their other Cousin played nicely, and then not so nicely and then actually quite violently. Particularly when they were all on the trampoline (or "bounce-a-lene" as the Cousin insists on calling it) and the Girl and the Cousin tried to strangle the Boy with his own t-shirt. He didn't seem to mind too much. Either that or he knows better than to argue with two psychotic females.

After dinner the three children decided to put on a concert for the assembled adults, so they ran around collecting every musical instrument they could find (which turns out, was a lot) and set them up in the front room. Everyone was given a ticket (a post-it note), and we were ordered (not told - ordered) into our seats. The Cousin handed me a cushion and told me, rather pointedly 

"You have to use this to shoot any bad guys."

Then she and the Boy organised several "guards" around the stage, as if they were expecting trouble. It was a bit the Rolling Stones at the Isle of White - if you replaced Hells Angels with toddlers. Meanwhile, as a joke, I started shooting the Cousin with the cushion she'd given me. This did not go down well, and after a second time she confiscated the cushion from me

"Not me! You have to shoot bad guys!"

and demonstrated this by shooting her Grandmother. Having performed this execution, the Kids then proceeded with the concert. Now I know two of them were my Kids, and I'm a proud father so I'm a bit biased, but it really was god-awful. The Boy was on keyboards, the Girl (aptly) on drums and the Cousin on vocals. VERY vocals. Mainly what she did was tell us all off. In a weird way it was a bit like a free-form jazz recital I once went to. Then the Boy got up and danced like a robot, the Cousin ran out the room with her arms in the air and the Girl fell over the drums. Finally, the Boy tried to play the Kings of Leon "Sex on Fire"

"I can't find sex on the keyboard. Ess.... Sssss... Sssss..."

And before he asked us which key was sex, we all got up and left. Frankly the whole thing was a debacle. I really should have drunk more.