Ideas for blog posts are like buses...

...you wait ages for one to show up, and then five come along at once. You stick your arm out for the first one but the driver sees you have a pushchair and some shopping bags, and tears past you, by which time the second has decided you were going to get the first and keeps going, so you stick your hand out somewhat aggressively for the third, until you realise it's not going where you want it to go, but it's has already come to a stop and the driver remonstrates with you for hailing a blog post under false pretenses; meanwhile the fourth speeds past, at which you waves your fists and yell obscenities, so that your final hope - the fifth - thinks better of picking up an irate Ugg-wearer and carries on by.

That was a rather long-winded way of saying that there has been a lot going on - exciting stuff, emotional stuff, and the usual mopping-the-floor stuff - which generally means my brain short circuits and I cannot put my thoughts into neat packages.

If it's any consolation, I feel bad about it. But it's no use, I shall have to ditch the idea of buses for now and get on that plane - I'm heading home in 6 hours. See you soon, London.

What Not To Wear, 2

I'm being terrorised by a fashion-conscious six-year-old.

First it was the Uggs. Since that horrifying incident, during which she tried to forcibly remove the offending footwear from my person, she has kept up her Ugg-tormenting. 

"You're wearing your Uggs again!" she shouts from across the park. Then she comes closer, and looks from them, to me, with such derision that I feel a bit tight around the chest. She does this every time I wear my Uggs to the park, which is approximately thrice a week. It has gotten so that I can't bring myself not to wear them, because what if sub-consciously I'm ditching them because a six-year-old who wears Little Miss Chatterbox t-shirts thinks I'm a geek?

However, even I draw the line at wearing sheepskin-inners when it's 25 degrees, so today I went to the park Ugg-free. I felt confident - I knew I wasn't wearing them for the right reasons, and that I could also guarantee no sneering looks.

Or so I thought.

It began well. She raced over to where I was crouching down to brush tanbark off The Boy's head (he and a friend had been playing It's Raining Tanbark with much hilarity until the rain got in their eyes). She wanted to know why The Girl and Boy had orange and black stripes all over their faces. I replied that it was oil pastel, and they were playing tigers earlier, and I couldn't be bothered to wash it off till bath time. All acceptable, so far.

Then I stood up.

"Oh - you look ODD," she said. I pretended I hadn't heard.

"I said you look ODD. Why are you wearing runners with a skirt? Why?"

"Um, they're not really runners. They're kind of sneakers."

"They look like runners. And with a long skirt. That just looks weird."

"Oh," I said, looking down at my feet, and mentally agreeing with her. "Oh well!" I breezed, as I turned and walked away, thinking "I'm telling my blog on you."

A Muesli Post

I was up early, at The Boy's insistence. We sat on the sofa; me bleary of eye and fuzzy of head, him raring to go. "Bugsla," he kept saying. "Bugsla," more earnest every time. I eventually worked out that he was saying A Bug's Life. It took me so long I actually agreed to let him watch it. Come on, it was 6am, not a time for wholesome activities like puzzles.

I ate muesli. He had three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks came downstairs at 7.30 and then the day really began, with getting dressed and packing morning tea and packing ourselves off to nursery, where I was helping out for the morning. 

I washed paint brushes, and made "Ooh, lovely" noises about the children's artwork. One little girl said to another: "I'm not playing with you today, I'm playing with her instead." I told her that wasn't very nice at all. She looked at me as if she could not give a toss what I thought.

We went home and ate pasta. The Australian made me a delicious coffee on our delicious-coffee-machine.

We played Barbies, and vets, and shops, and farms with dingoes and koalas and platypuses. I wondered if it was correct to say platypi, or platypus-plural, or platypodes. Then I stopped wondering and cooked the tea. 

They ate, they jumped off every piece of furniture while I shouted "Someone will get hurt." Someone got hurt. We went upstairs and did pyjamas and teeth and stories and cuddles. I sang "Truly Scrumptious". They went to sleep.

And then I came downstairs and signed the contract for my novel! 

It's not every day...