I am Flamoesje’s father and I have my own pony slaughterhouse: Het Gillende Galopje | Family

Cry for help in the shoulder com-mail. That is such an online information box for parents and teachers for everything that is going on in primary school. I often forgot to look in it and missed a lot because of it. Four-day walks, craft afternoons, reading mornings, tell-about-your-work-in-class moments.

Secretly I didn’t mind that I had missed all this. Imagine being a pony butcher! Hello children, I am Gerrit, the father of Flamoesje and I am the boss of my own pony slaughterhouse. When I started for myself, Flamoesje was allowed to come up with the name and my company is called the Gillende Galopje. To slaughter a pony you need a sharp knife with a point and you prick it in the neck of the pony so that it has already bled to death within fifteen minutes. Then you mop the splashes from the wall and floor and remove your earmuffs. Because children, those little pussy horses can scream very loudly when they are in pain!

Alright, all missed. Now there is only one surviving relative in primary school, the rest were found to be too old at one point and were sent away. I have improved my life and carefully read the mail in Shouldercom. So I also saw the cry for help as mentioned above: they were looking for parents who could transport children to Batavialand. That is a museum in the always picturesque Lelystad, the city where everyone says they don’t want to hang dead over the hedge yet, but where no fewer than 81,214 people live. Separate.

Besides being amazingly good looking, I also have a sickly good heart and I applied. Room for 7 children in my Dacia, that wheelie bin. The teacher was overjoyed with me. I just wrote that I read the emails carefully. Or so I thought. But no; I had missed that you are not only a taxi driver, you were also allowed to join the museum afterwards to participate in the treasure hunt, embroidery, viewing shipwrecks with the children you had just delivered as a group supervisor, and then there was also strict action should be taken against the excesses of childhood: screaming, running, screaming, breathing loudly, removing each other’s eyes with a spoon and other things that children simply do because it is part of being a child.

Now I’m not really known for my consistent parenting methods. If a child asks me something and I say no and that child (I’m talking about my youngest daughter here) starts crying and looks at me as if I just bit off the cute little head of her sweet poodle puppy with my teeth, then my no soon a yes. What also happens regularly (again, I’m talking about my youngest daughter, whom I kind of love), is that a child simply says daddy 78 times in a row. Loud and in my face. Then I often don’t keep up my no.

Back to the topic! I toured the museum with my group of children, to my surprise they listened quite well. Didn’t think that really fit the spirit of the times, but it might also have helped that I dragged them through the museum at lightning speed. No time to pelt each other with petrified turds from the Middle Ages or toss from a balustrade onto the skeleton of a sailor who had once taken in too much water.

My group was the first to finish, while we arrived last because I had once again misunderstood my navigation. The last will be the first! So I had to entertain them for another half hour, I couldn’t, they ran around screaming until a lady from the museum who did have natural authority said something about it. Then I was allowed to take them back to school. I could go home and drink whiskey with trembling hands.