Father's Day.
'Smile harder, you look like you're about to be shot' Syed hissed into his ear, Saffiya attempted to wriggle out of his grip and he tucked her back into his grip, a minute later Syed took up Saffy-wrangling.
The doors creaked open and the Year Two teachers filed out, then the students flooded out, each holding a pastel coloured, sparkly card and a paper flower. Except as it turned out, Kamran and Zayn, who charged out with dark blue cards and paper ducklings. Children all around cried a premature 'Happy Mother's Day!' to their respective mothers, Kamran and Zayn screeched to a halt in front of them, handed Syed their bags, which he managed to hook on the arm that didn't hold Saffiya, and shouted 'Happy Father's Day!' at him, and handed him the cards, dark blue with coloured stripes of paper stuck to them, and the ducklings.
'Thank you' he said, looking briefly up at the boys teacher who gave him a thumbs up, he nodded at her before Kamran said 'look, the legs and wings move' and grabbed one of the ducklings to demonstrate.
'That's pretty cool, you made these yourselves?' he asked.
'Miss Anson put the pins in, but we did everything else' Kamran said, Saffiya was trying to climb over Syed to get to the ducklings.
'Ok, why don't you two take your bags and we'll head home and find somewhere to put these' he said. The boys nodded and tore their bags off of Syed, who was glad for the use of both arms with Saffiya. For once Kamran didn't run off and try to talk to all his friends as they left, instead he walked along with them and discussed where to put the cards with Zayn, though mostly he was just talking at Zayn, suggesting the cards should go on the moon.
They'd tossed a coin to decide who got Mother's Day and who got Father's Day after the fiasco last year, he'd lost, but right now he didn't mind.