‘Tis the season for… chaos

When I was a kid every day on the road to Christmas Day felt like an eternity. It was always stinking hot and my little sister (Sister Sledge) and I used to amuse ourselves with activities such as riding our bikes past the neighbours' house on the corner (the only one with the pool in the street) and shouting to each other, “OH, IT’S SOOOOOOO HOT!” in the hope that our passive aggressiveness would yield us a swim in the pool. It usually did! 

And on one particularly long and languid pre-Christmas December Day in the 80s, Sister Sledge and I took the bikes for a spin down to the corner shop to buy craft materials – to cut into miniscule pieces – to create a Mr. Squiggle board game.  Yep, the days were very, very long!

What I don’t remember is when the days switched from being long, hot and languid to frantic, air-conditioned and chaotic? When did I stop lying on my stomach, creating a board game, in the middle of the lounge room for an entire day, and start trying to cram multiple events on every given day in the lead up to Christmas?

I only have one husband and two children and yet I feel like I am project managing a large corporation. Between my work and Pineman’s work and day care and pre-school and school orientations and birthday parties and Christmas parties and more Christmas parties and Christmas shopping, I am starting to feel like I’m on a conveyor belt which is creeping toward some dark and ominous pit and inside the pit are metres and metres of tinsel and an inflatable Santa.

 I am quite debilitated by the chaos this year. And my coping mechanism seems to be: inane shopping expeditions and popping ibuprofen (in no particular order).

I used to be quite a productive Christmas shopper, but this year, in the small amount of time I have had to shop, I have been faffing about, coming home with random items and forgetting things like the milk.

The other day it took me at least 45 minutes to walk from the bike section of Toys R Us to the end of ONE car aisle. It was not a great distance, but this is what I achieved in the process: I bumped into someone I knew and had a chat. Waited whilst The Ranga drove a large plastic car around. Idly threatened said child out of large plastic car. Waited whilst The Ranga AND Miss C drove large plastic cars around. Idly threatened said children out of large plastic cars. Was accosted by woman wanting to know all about electronic guinea pigs. Delivered winning sales pitch to not one but THREE women regarding electronic guinea pigs and up-sold matching accessories. Witnessed a little boy piss himself all over his bewildered father and the floor. Offered all spare wipes, pull-ups and shorts to bewildered father who had a little boy, a baby, a pram and NO nappy bag! Dictated the makes and models of the entire range of Matchbox cars to the eager Ranga, then promptly forgot why I was there and walked out with nothing!    

 I have also found myself getting all antsy when I can’t find particular items, begging shop assistants to just check one more time please, trying to materialise a Jessie and Bullseye (from Toy Story 3) double pack when I know full well that Jessie on her own would be quite adequate. And having loud conversations on my mobile in aisles that sound like this, “DO YOU THINK THE RANGA WOULD LIKE A STAR WARS DOUBLE PACK WITH R2D2 and C3PO WITH A BATTLE DROID HEAD? NO, IT HAS AN INTERCHANGEABLE C3PO HEAD. NO, IT’S NOT FROM THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY, BUT DO YOU THINK HE WOULD LIKE IT??”

If I have achieved nothing else this Christmas, I’m pretty sure I gave the poindexter father in the aisle next to me an erection.

But it’s not really the kids’ presents that pose the greatest problems, it’s all the tricky gifts like those for pre-school teachers and day care teachers and ballet teachers and even when they have been carefully selected, Miss C wants to value add with some homemade craft. I commend her for her thoughtfulness, I really do (season of giving and all). But her idea this year is to make individual paper doily people for her pre-school teachers, which involves glue and pom poms and large paddle pop sticks and cutting and pipe cleaners and oh my GOD, between that and the writing of Christmas cards when she cannot yet write, is causing me to reach for the ibuprofen quicker than Frosty the friggin’ Snowman can meet his demise in the Australian sun.  

We are eight days into December and we haven’t even put up the tree!! This never would’ve happened when I was a kid. The tree went up on the first day of December, and Mum would’ve patiently encouraged the Mr Squiggle board game craft. Hell, she would’ve even cracked open the glue! I don’t remember my parents being this harried around Christmas (although my mother did line up at a shop at midnight on Christmas Eve 1984 to secure a Cabbage Patch Kid for me – I’m sure that was relaxing). Maybe they were and I just didn’t notice? Maybe my kids won’t notice?

Colouring outside the lines

I thought it was only my husband who was cultivating a household full of nerds - prepping them for a lifetime of geeky pursuits and school yard crucifixion.

And admittedly he has played a major role.

Case in point:

1.       The Ranga’s OBSESSION with Star Wars. He has only ever seen snippets of the movie, but can still re-enact pivotal scenes using Mega Bloks, plastic golf sticks as lightsabers, and a fake pumpkin as an explosion (flip one over and believe it or not it actually looks like one). He can name all of the characters, and can be found meandering around the house dressed as Darth Vader, draped in a quilt and wearing a bucket on his head.

2.       Miss C’s anal artistic endeavours. Pineman and I both have creative backgrounds. However, I am not the one who paints armies of miniature figurines and teaches the kids bizarre colour names.  Miss C dropped a pencil from our back deck the other day and when I asked her which colour it was so I could go and look for it, she responded with, “snake leather bite”. 

“What the hell is snake leather bite??” I demanded of Pineman who nearly collapsed with laughter (obviously some nerdy in-joke) and replied with, “I think she means ‘snake bite leather’”. Because that sounded far more reasonable!

Anyway, The Ranga banging on about how he can only be addressed as Han Solo, coupled with Miss C’s eternal meltdowns about people using the WRONG colour for faces and everyone colouring outside the lines, got me thinking.

If my children are this anal/nerdy/obsessive then perhaps there is more than one gene pool to blame. So I took a good hard look at myself and this is what I discovered…

I was not cool at school – maybe not the lowest common denominator - but certainly not far off. I played in the school band and sang in the choir. I took part in school musicals (anyone who has seen Glee will understand what that did for my reputation). I represented the school in debating for the annual interschool ‘sports’ visit (yes, in my mind it was a sport). I lived across the road from my high school and my dad was one of my teachers!

Amongst other achievements, I used to have to get up in front of the whole school to accept an ‘attendance award’ each year. Yay for me, fellow students – I have been to school Every. Single. Day. This. Year. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s my dad who just kicked someone out of the assembly.

Any wonder I never had a boyfriend?

And while everyone at university was wrestling in a jelly pit or sculling beer from a communal yard glass, I was in the library conducting research for my assignments. Need I say more?

But what I have found is that years of achievement in my youth has lead to years and years of underachievement in adulthood.

I have hopped from job to job to job, never knowing what to do next, never staying long enough to climb any ladders, terrified of failure, terrified of success.

I have realised that the types of people who truly succeed in life are the ones who are not afraid to push boundaries, take risks and dream big. The types of people who truly succeed in life wear thick raincoats to weather all manner of storms.

I am not that type of person.  My raincoat tears very, very easily, and I’ve never been a big fan of drowning.

I continued to ponder all of these things recently whilst attending Miss C’s school orientation session.

What do I want for my daughter as she embarks on this new and formative part of her life? We are so painfully similar in some respects that it’s excruciating to watch.

I keep telling her that it’s okay to make mistakes and there are different versions of ‘right’. But I’m not sure I truly believe half the stuff I tell her.

I want to let her know that there are so many pathways to achievement. That she has so many options. That failure is not a catastrophic event.

I want her to find something she is passionate about – anything at all – and not be afraid to pursue it.

I want her to feel like she can colour outside the lines, jump in the jelly pit and scull from the communal yard glass (or maybe not the latter – it just sounds naff!)

I want to send her to school armed with a bulletproof vest and the world’s thickest raincoat, to weather all the storms.

I’m not sure what ticks away in that little mind of hers - but when the previously anal artist presented me with a picture of a rainbow coloured mouse recently and said, “I’m going to start doing my art differently because it’s art” – I thought: perhaps the raincoat I’m sending her with is thick enough?

Much ado about poo

When I was a little girl I remember running to the huge gum tree in our backyard and hiding behind it with my eyes squeezed shut and my fingers jammed in my ears because my mother had taken some asthma medication that had made her dry retch.

I also remember not eating Caramello Koalas, roast chicken, scones and a myriad of other foods for years because (on one occasion) I vomited after eating them and somehow associated them with being spew-worthy.

And then there was the park I wouldn’t look at every time we drove past because (on one occasion) I ate some stale baked beans whilst playing there and proceeded to spend the night throwing up. Banned the park. Banned baked beans. You get the picture. Nutcase! 

So the fact I can now hold The Ranga’s heaving head over a bucket every fifteen minutes for an entire night and scrape chunks of vomit from the fibres of bed linen makes me mighty proud!

From the moment I witnessed my first meconium-filled nappy to the moment I wore my first projectile vomit – I realised I was going to become intimately involved with Another Person’s Bodily Fluids – For. A. Very. Long. Time.

Miss C is fairly low maintenance these days. She can use the toilet, rarely vomits and can wipe her own nose. The Ranga, on the other hand, is like a fire hydrant squirting from all orifices. If he coughs too hard, he spews. If he throws an almighty tantrum, he spews. If he eats too much, he spews. He has only just learnt to wee sans nappy (at 3.5 years) and was found recently in the kids’ toilet at a resort, naked from the waist down, and ‘ice-skating’ in a concoction of soap and his own urine!

But it’s poo he has the most problems with. When he isn’t withholding for three days, he is unloading giant brown packages in undies, in nappies, in the bath, on the floor, and occasionally, in the toilet! He has ‘issues’ with the whole bowel movement arrangement and I get where he’s coming from. Poo does not have many endearing qualities. It’s brown, it smells, and in our house, it incites more hysteria than Beatlemania (for him, not us).

If I were poo’s publicist, I would slam the door in its face!

However, because I empathise with my phobic son – having rejected spew-inducing parks and baked beans and chicken, myself - I am determined to put the positive in poo…and any assistance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

The only two poo role models I have come up with thus far have been:

1.   “Mr Hankey, the Christmas Poo” from South Park. But I don’t really want The Ranga a) watching South Park at the age of three or b) fishing his faeces out of the toilet or his nappy or whatever, to engage it in conversation.

2.   A woman I saw on a documentary recently who was making sculptures out of cow manure – with bare hands – because she liked the texture!! WHAT!?!

So I Googled ‘poo’ to see what came up (as Google contains all of life’s answers) and found an array of links to poo and wee songs, poo arcade games, poo humour, stories about whale poo and climate change, Bristol stool analysis charts (with pictures!!!), more people creating art using faeces (what’s with that??) and bizarre YouTube videos that I was too afraid to click on.

And I still have nothing!!

We have always been fans of the no pressure approach to toileting, and The Ranga has willingly participated in the pooing in the toilet process three times, but he now equates defecating with losing a vital internal organ and no amount of cajoling will convince him otherwise.

The only solution I can come up with (besides bribery, nappies for life etc.) is to keep allowing The Ranga to watch people using the toilet until he learns that it is a perfectly natural and convenient human function.

Like I did on Saturday - when I was using the parents’ room toilet in a shopping centre - and he hit the button for the automatic door whilst I was mid-wee. Not sure how many people copped an eyeful, as I was too busy cutting off the stream (surprisingly good pelvic floor muscles), leaping across the room, cowering in a corner and screeching with my pants around my ankles.

The moral to this sordid tale: I may have overcome my childhood vomit phobia, but have now developed an irrational fear of my naked arse being exposed in public.

And…The Ranga has not pooed for three days!

Birthday celebrations...post-kid style

I am writing under pressure tonight as I set this personal goal to blog once a week. I thought that seemed fairly reasonable, but as it turns out…it is damn hard - made especially hard by our annual trip to Spew Central this week (which requires its own post)!

Anyway, my personal deadline passed yesterday and now I’m all antsy about missing the deadline when there really is no deadline at all.

So rather than wait to write a piece of moderate quality - I thought I’d rush and produce a piece of crap – just to meet my personal deadline.

What I should be doing is writing the piece my therapist asked me to write on guilt and sabotage (why I do it to myself, not others), which is due in two days, and which I am feeling increasingly guilty about not completing.

Is it any surprise I am seeing a therapist?

The other reason I wanted to rush this one is because today is Pineman’s birthday and we celebrated post-kid style.

Celebrating a birthday post-kid style is like waking up and celebrating a Monday. There was really nothing different about awakening today except the four squishy hands prising apart our eyelids were also thrusting presents enthusiastically at Pineman – oh, and no one was vomiting.

We washed and fed people and fed ourselves and packed lunches and packed bags and dropped kids at respective care centres and I forgot to take my lunch to work and Pineman had to drop it in and then he was home alone – on his birthday – watching a James Bond flick on DVD and eating takeaway for lunch. And then he picked up kids from care arrangements and I came home from work early – with a cake – to surprise him and he was standing at the front door, drinking mocha, and looking every one of his forty four years.  

He told me the highlight of his day was realising that Octopussy was not about a girl with eight vaginas. He later changed his highlight to witnessing my top falling down when I was dancing in the kitchen – his highlight, not mine.

He washed more people while I cooked pork chops and carrot and potato and frozen peas and corn for dinner.

 The Ranga had a tantrum because he wanted to wear the pyjamas with the robots and the tractors and the monsters.  The Ranga threw his water on the floor because he wanted the Lightning McQueen cup and not the Batman cup. The Ranga threw his pork on the floor because…well because he has issues with food and certain cups and pyjamas and etiquette. Miss C started whingeing about peas and pork, and I got worked up and started using my OUTSIDE VOICE!

Pineman asked the kids if they cared about his birthday or just the cake, to which they replied in unison, “just the cake”.

They redeemed themselves momentarily with a round of apologies and a rollicking rendition of Happy Birthday to You.  

The Ranga pulled apart his cake and squished it between his fingers because he doesn’t like cream or jam or small servings of cake.

Pineman got ready for a nightshift at work and walked out the door indicating that he might play his “birthday privileges card” when he gets home after midnight.

Well, it’s now 1:18am, no sign of Pineman – birthday privileges revoked!

Good night.

When life hands you lemons…

Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you the whole friggin’ orchard!

Seven years ago today we lost our first baby at fifteen weeks gestation to a congenital birth abnormality. It was a little boy. And when he died, a piece of me died too.

His condition was called Megacystis, which in simple terms meant he had an enlarged bladder. In reality, it meant death was inevitable. We made an impossible choice.

At the time I felt like a spectator watching a car spiralling out of control and slamming into a tree. Except I wasn’t a spectator, I was driving the car.

I tried desperately to crawl out of the wreck, grasping at anything that could help me escape my situation, but when pregnancy number two (another son) ended abruptly at fourteen and a half weeks gestation for an unrelated chromosome abnormality, I was emotionally spent.

It must have been some overwhelming instinctual desire that took over after that, because there was no good intellectual reason for trying again – the odds were certainly not in our favour. In that time I juiced thousands of lemons.

My third pregnancy was different from the beginning, but the vice-like grip around my chest never really allowed me to believe it. My focus was always on the finish line, and when I found out the due date was three days before today’s date, I knew my baby would be born late.

As I laboured through the night, I realised my prophecy was coming true - my first living child was going to be born on the second anniversary of my first son’s death.  I felt the planets align that morning.

Five years ago today I gave birth to a daughter. She was my daughter and she was tiny and pink and breathing, and when I held her to my chest, she urinated down the front of me just to let me know that her little bladder was working.

And now she is five, and she is one of the sweetest, most complicated little people I know. When I look at her I see myself, which both delights and terrifies me.  She is creative and inquisitive and caring, and at the core of her being is someone who loves with her whole heart – and I love her with all of mine.

Five years ago today, with the scars from the squeezing indelibly etched, I learnt how to make lemonade.

Mister Maker has a lot to answer for!

I understand the value of kids and The Creative Arts. I really do. I studied music, art, and drama at school and have been known to break out in spontaneous song and dance numbers when the mood strikes me.

My husband (otherwise known as Pineman due to a questionable haircut that left him resembling the fronds on a pineapple) is not particularly dramatic but is incredibly musical and artistic, so I realise we must accept some responsibility for our kids’ artistic temperaments.

However, I think someone else needs to take some responsibility for our children’s manic craft episodes, and that is a British television show host who sports a zany vest, has crazy eyes, and fashions crafty things out of inanimate objects from his ‘doodle drawers’.  He paints, he sticks, he glues, he cuts, and somewhere in the middle of the program he wakes up some shapes that jump down from a shelf and sing, “I am a shape…la la la la”. 

He is Mister Maker, and he is an enabler!

At one stage my kids were so enamoured with Mister Maker that we had to record the show daily. They even assigned a shape to everyone in the family, and if I happened to be in the room at the wrong time, I had to be a square.

But it’s the way their little eyes light up when they see a ‘fake spilt milkshake’ being created using pink paint mixed with glue or a ‘donkey puppet’ made by sticking two boxes together and then plastered with paint, pom poms and googly eyes, that incites me to throw all easily accessible art products on a Very High Shelf.

Apologies in advance to my high school art teacher, but the three core reasons for my disdain for children’s Visual Arts are as follows:

Visual Arts are messy.

During The Ranga’s recent pre-school orientation session, he gravitated towards the painting table, and with a furrowed brow, started furiously striking the paper with the intensity of Vincent Van Gough. He layered and layered and layered and added A LOT of water from the rinsing cup and produced the masterpiece, ‘Anakin’s Footprints’, which looked suspiciously like his previous series, ‘Stars and Rope’.

Later when trying to wrangle two wet paintings, a backpack, a pair of shoes and the rescuing of The Ranga from a giant bindi patch, I copped the full force of a dripping ‘Anakin’s Footprints’ in the face; which brings me to my next point…

Visual Arts are hard to transport.

As much as I adore pre-schools and day care centres for allowing my children to creatively express themselves without my presence, they really need to consider leasing trailers.

Miss C recently brought home FOUR egg cartons containing the inside padding from a bra (apparently beds for her dolls), two paintings, two drawings and two cardboard boxes covered in paint and glitter stuck together with an empty paper towel roll and some painted yoghurt containers (apparently a boat).

And once when it was pouring rain, I had to haul a saturated Ranga, a pair of sodden thongs, a handbag, a backpack, seventeen drawings, and a pair of cardboard and cotton wool bunny ears. Plus, Miss C had to trail behind toting an umbrella, a wet painting, and a toy chicken in a basket made out of an egg carton and a pipe cleaner.

Trailer anyone?

And sometimes the art just keeps on travelling with us…like Miss C’s paper doily people who have to be strapped into the car and attend her ballet lessons.

But possibly art’s most heinous crime is its prevalence!

Visual Arts are like The Plague.

My kids never stop creating and it’s like some insidious disease that has infiltrated the house.

Despite my best intentions to follow the advice of every parent and magazine and book with their ‘great ideas’ about displaying/storing/using children’s artworks - turn it into wrapping paper, take photos of the art and make a photo book, create a crafty display wall (which would involve me creating craft to store the craft!), frame it - to the parent of the prolific artist, it is all bullshit!

I have saved some, framed three pieces for Miss C to hang in her room, stuck them to the fridge, made numerous, subtle trips to the recycling bin, and yet we are still destined to be like one of those families who have to be rescued by a bulldozer and a team of cleaners and a television crew because we have horded so much crap.

The moral to the story…

I can tolerate The Ranga’s made-up songs about Star Wars characters to the tune of Train’s Save Me San Francisco for ten straight minutes, followed by a cry of, “Mum, I can feel another song coming on”.

I can even tolerate Miss C dressing up in a petticoat I wore as a flower girl in a debutante ball when I was nine, coupled with an old bikini top, and dragging herself along the ground pretending to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

But the next time I hear the theme song to Mister Maker, please allow me to rock in the corner and silently weep.

How to deal with a visit from the great-grandparents…

I come from a long line of perfectionists on my mother’s side – my maternal grandparents being the Patriarch and Matriarch of Perfection. They are always prompt and extremely polite. Their cars have always been polished until they shone, every log book service completed on the due date. When they had a lawn, it was always manicured, the plants pruned and the gardens weeded. The house was always pristine, and when I stayed with them as a little girl, I’d never slept in fresher sheets or been tucked in tighter.

My maternal grandmother is the quintessential 1950’s housewife – she has had weekly hair appointments for her entire adult life, she wears heels and stockings – all year round - even on the hottest Australian summer days. She always dresses as if she might bump into The Queen at any given moment.

She and my mother are the most obsessively organised women on the planet. They diarise everything (my grandmother even transfers things from her handbag diary to her house diary) and both have supreme budgeting skills. They have always kept a rigid cleaning/ironing/housekeeping schedule, which my mother somehow managed to juggle with work.

 I, on the other hand, am seriously flawed. Yes, I inherited some of the organisational skills, my grandmother’s uncanny knack for remembering dates, and their obsession with details, but somewhere in the mix I lost the Suzy Homemaking gene.

My sister is the exactly the same. My mother has been known to place her head in her hands and utter, “I just don’t know where I went wrong”, like our lack of ability to iron, or more to the point, our lack of ability to care about ironing is somehow a reflection on her parenting skills.

I would love nothing more than to exist in a tidy environment, be able to find a matching pair of socks on demand, or pull something out of the wardrobe that is *gasp* already ironed, but sadly this is rarely the case. And having children has just exacerbated the situation. Most of the time it looks like a crazy dictator just released a nuclear bomb in the house, except that I have two crazy dictators and twice the explosive aftermath.

And that’s what the house looked like yesterday - at 11.00am - when my grandfather rang and asked if they could give Miss Curious (Miss C) her 5^th birthday present TWO WEEKS EARLY! I looked at the clock. I was still in my pyjamas and my hair looked like a scarecrow. I looked at the bedraggled kids. I looked at the monumental pile of filing and paperwork and miscellaneous crap on the coffee table. I looked down at the suspicious brown stain on the kitchen floor, which had only been brought to my attention moments ago by Miss C. “When Clare (Miss C’s Best Friend Forever) comes over when I’m 10; I hope she doesn’t spot THIS!”

I paused and then said to my grandfather, “sure, we’d love to see you. What time do you think you will be here? In 20 minutes……….great!”

During these moments, I am torn between wanting desperately to impress them and really not giving a toss. Under the time constraints, I usually manage to satisfy both.

The kids are aware of the dire need to clean up at these times. They have learnt from experience that at some point I will spontaneously combust. So they started running through the house. The Ranga was throwing cars into a drawer at an alarming rate. Miss C cleaned the entire back room in a matter of minutes. I showered, threw the scarecrow hair into a ponytail and made all of the beds.

And then I saw them walking down the driveway. I glanced around but there was no more time. The kitchen benches were covered with breakfast dishes, left over fast food packaging from the night before, and another miscellaneous pile of paperwork (where do these piles come from?)The Ranga had also traded cleaning up all of his cars for emptying the entire contents of his wardrobe onto the floor.

On a positive note, I wasn’t naked. Last week, after showering, I was walking from the bathroom to the bedroom (in the nude) and noticed, through the bedroom blinds my husband had kindly left open, my mother, my aunty, my uncle and my cousin all arriving for a ‘surprise’ visit. I immediately dropped to the ground and commando rolled across the floor to reach my robe. But a robe wouldn’t have sufficed on this occasion.

My grandparents don’t do nudity.

 I answered the door fully dressed and lead them through the bomb site to the back room where we made pleasantries and drank cups of tea and ate the ‘good biscuits’. I told them about The Ranga’s major toilet training achievement - the wearing of undies for two days in a row (even though he is three years, five months and they hail from the era of toilet training children at the age of one). The children then regaled them with lessons in Star Wars 101, reciting the names of ALL characters from the trilogy and the three prequels.

And then The Ranga disappeared.

The thought crossed my mind that I should check on him…and then he reappeared. His skinny white legs were moving at lightning speed. I scanned him up and down and realised he was wearing nothing but a   T-shirt. In the time it took for me to wish I could just wiggle my nose and materialise a pair of pants (and a clean kitchen), he streaked past, his weapon of mass destruction dangling from side to side. I lurched forward to grab him, but it was too late. My 82-year-old grandmother was clutching the side of the buffet and hyperventilating.

We promptly shuffled my grandparents down the hallway, kicking The Ranga’s bedroom door shut on the way through to contain the hazardous waste that was spilling from the doorway, and bid them farewell.

I slowly exhaled, glanced around, and thought: perhaps perfection is overrated…

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye…or their hearing?

I dread the mere thought of indoor play centres during the school holidays. So what did I do the other day when a light hearted conversation with a friend and some hardcore entertainment for the kids were desperately required? I threw my children into a giant circus-themed menagerie for four hours.  

Just walking through the Magna Latched gates, kids tagged like homing pigeons, was like heading into a zoo. My kids couldn’t get at it fast enough – leaping like little lemurs across the floor. My red-headed three-year-old son otherwise known as, “The Ranga”, was swinging through the oversized enclosure like his namesake orangutan within seconds.

Where does all of the energy come from?? And the noise!! The cacophony of squawking children was giving me a twitch and I’d only been there for five minutes. I glanced around and noticed some grandparents with earphones listening to an iPod!

The frenzied, primal rock concert (devoid of any music) continued while I waited for my friend.  And then she arrived…with one, two, three, four, FIVE children. That’s five plus my two equals SEVEN! She has three kids of her own but had acquired a couple of ring ins. This disturbed me on a number of levels…

1.   Is this what happens when your kids start school (as my daughter will be doing in a few months)? You have to look after Other People’s Children under the guise of a “play date”?

2.   We were about to add seven children to the seven hundred children already darting, leaping and squawking around the room.

I scanned the room for a table but every single one was occupied by parents with backpacks and water bottles and prams and shoes and seventy macerated hot chips. I began to stalk the tables like a crazed woman and wouldn’t have gone past bribery and corruption to attain one. When one large group FINALLY decided to leave, I pounced on them, and much to their dismay, I was sitting down before they had a chance to clear their belongings.  Not my usual style but it was survival of the fittest!

The food arrived and my friend and I managed to retrieve all SEVEN children, who in turn proceeded to squish another seventy hot chips into the furniture. God knows how we located all seven. I believe indoor play centres should introduce a large piece of elastic that attaches each kid to their parent or carer. This would alleviate the inevitable journey up a fully enclosed plastic tunnel to rescue a stuck or lost child, or a trip to the bottom of the God forsaken ball pit. Ball pits are cesspits – dig deep enough and you will find a veritable lucky dip. I know they are cleaned blah, blah, blah, but I have, in the past, penetrated the plump, colourful surface to search for a missing sock and have discovered a treasure trove of crusty socks, clumps of hair, nit-infested combs, and mucus-filled tissues.

The magnificent seven then stuffed their faces full of ice-cream and lined up for the carousel. They chanted and rattled the gate like caged animals and my immediate thought was hot chips + ice-cream + spinning = projectile vomiting. 

The Ranga giggled with delight as he whizzed past and then suddenly decided that enough was enough and crawled out of the cup…WHILE IT WAS STILL SPINNING! I screamed and rattled the Magna Latched gate trying to get in, but discovered it was also parent proof.

By some sheer stroke of luck he came out of it unscathed, apart from being emotionally shattered.  I braced myself for the vomit but it didn’t come!

My children are champion vomiters and don’t do well with dizziness, as I discovered one day at a local park when they spun themselves into a frenzy on a spinning thing. The Ranga fell off, staggered like a drunken sailor, face planted in the wood chip and then vomited. I was both amused and horrified and assured everyone that he did not have a gastro virus as I casually kicked some wood chip over the pile of vomit. My almost five-year-old daughter saved her vomit for the car park.  

The kids darted off again and my friend and I tried to continue our staccato conversation, which was punctuated by toilet breaks and the comforting of squashed children. When we came to the realisation that we were flogging a dead horse, we rallied the troops.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, EIGHT! My daughter had befriended a random child who was her “new best friend and could she please come for a sleepover?” NO! I had to explain that random children CANNOT under any circumstances come to the house for sleepovers.

After a final head count I cast my eyes over my children. All limbs appeared intact, only one squashed hand and a scratch on the forehead. Both were wearing TWO socks – matching and their own!  The Ranga had a tub of tomato sauce and an entire chocolate ice-cream down his front, and surprisingly no one had vomited. I could no longer hear a word anyone was saying, but even with a lollipop shoved in their sticky mouths I could see they were smiling.