Was or wasn’t out?

Five hours in a row, I watched six-year-old Archie’s getting ever more exhausted and headstrong. He half-lay on the park bench twice with eyes closed just to bounce up hearing the dad’s soft voice asking if he wanted to sleep.

I could remember the other day last year when he got stuck in песочнице until he peed twice in his pants, desperately chilled but kept playing on and on. 

I tried reasoning that tomorrow we’d come again, that other kids were gone and he got bored. Proposals of cartoons, drinks, food were sharply set aside. Did he want to pee? “No” again.

I didn’t feel like taking him home by force. My wife and I had put so much efforts in coping with his reluctance to go outdoors. It’s for the first time after the winter that he took his bicycle with him and immediately got so crazy about that. And now me going back? No way!

The fifth hour was coming to an end when finally I could make it right.

“Archie, will you tell mom how your time out was?”

He shook his head: “It wasn't my time out.”

We've got a work to be done on tenses, I thought.

“You're right, your time out isn't through yet but we’ve been here for some time so you can as well say it was your time out.”

“It wasn’t a time out,” he insisted.

It took a pause to find an appropriate answer.

“All right, it wasn't. Then tell me what kind of time was it?”

“It wasn’t a time out.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It can’t be so. Even if it was nothing special, it was something yet.”

“It wasn't something.”

I made a sharp turn: “Did you have your time at home?”

Deep thinking, unfirm “no”.

“Did you have your time at friends?”

“No” again.

“We are outdoors. That means we have our time out. All this is outdoors,” I waved my arm around the square.

“I have a time out,” he admitted. We both were silent for a while. Then he got up, got on the bike and met eyes with me.

“I want home,” he said. I didn’t move, relishing the moment, sitting on the bench. All was amazing: the weather, the fresh greens, the kid on the tiny red bike. I jumped on my feet.

“Come on then!”