There are the people who slowly cruise the streets, checking out other people’s rubbish piles, taking the stuff they think they can salvage (and hopefully not messing up the rest of the pile too much).

There are the people who, EVERY collection, seem to put out half a household worth of rubbish (I’m wondering if they’re actually the same people as above, who get home with their loot and think “Wait a minute - this rubbish is RUBBISH!”).

And there are the ships in the night, the people who come and add their rubbish to someone else’s pile in the middle of the night, so you get up the next morning to find your bag of green waste and cardboard box of old magazines has suddenly expanded to include a broken television, half a dolls pram and a suitcase of moldy clothing.

I’m feeling pretty pathetic this week, no-one has even slowed down to peruse my pile, I guess it really is junk *sniff*.

Yesterday was just a mess from the time I woke up. You know those days that go wrong before you’re even fully conscious. That was my yesterday. But we eventually arrived at the park, and I started to relax and have a good time.

And then I lost Hugo. He’d been playing close by in the playground area, always within sight and earshot. I tend to be a bit more relaxed with Hugo because he is not a child who wanders off, he was never a runner, and has a highly developed sense of risk and safety. One moment he was in the playground, the next he was nowhere to be seen. It was literally within seconds.

I am so grateful that I was there with these guys, they all scattered immediately to help me look, and fortunately he showed up within a couple of minutes. But those minutes … my brain just went wild with possible scenarios - had someone grabbed him from the playground? had he fallen in the lake? was he wandering around crying, wondering where I was? Every morbid news story I’d read about child abduction and accidents - and it happened so quickly, that was the scary thing. It was so, so fast.

He’d actually gone to feed the ducks with Leigh’s children. They looked after him so well, he was totally fine to go with them. He told me “I’m fine Mummy, I’m with the big kids” and he really was fine. I really didn’t want to let my panic show, and just told him that he needed to tell me every time he was going to leave the playground so I knew where he was.

It makes me wonder and worry. I was lucky yesterday, I was with friends and had help right there. What happens next year when I’m in a country with no social network, where I don’t even speak the primary language? How do I let my children grow up without restricting their experiences but still keep them safe?

We chose a “recently lauded with three hats by the Good Food Guide” seafood restaurant (no names …). It was a choice between this place, or Becasse. I had long wanted to go to Becasse but my lovely husband has been there before for functions so I (kindly, I thought) decided we’d go to this other restaurant instead. Big Mistake.

When you’re paying the kind of money a meal at a restaurant at this level costs, service really isn’t optional. There’s no excuse for the experience we had last night. None.

We arrived a little bit early for our booking time - I do mean a little bit, less than five minutes. We were told our table wasn’t ready and seated at the bar waved in the direction of the bar to wait. TWENTY MINUTES LATER I finally had enough of being ignored by all the wait staff who were rushing to and fro doing “busy work” and used my well honed evil eye to force the next one who walked past to acknowledge our existence. He finally asked if we’d been looked after, offered a drink etc. No actually, but now you mention it, twenty minutes ago would have been nice. Eventually we were shown to our table. Only to sit and wait for a further ten minutes while being ignored by the many, many, busy busy waiters.

Way to spoil the mood.

I had to ask for a menu. I am still slightly amazed by that. I HAD TO ASK FOR A MENU. I think between us we’ve had a fair experience of eating in good restaurants and we have never, EVER had to ask for the menu. Absolutely unheard of. And not once did they acknowledge the poor service. Seriously, they could have had me back in a flash, if they’d just said sorry.

I am a harsh critic. I will say, once we actually got a menu and got started, the food was great and the service was … well, enthusiastic if not exactly polished. But for the half an hour it took for us to be acknowledged I will never go back to that restaurant and I will tell anyone who asks not to go there and why.

Tip: $0.

Service fail.

I have to make a concerted effort to introduce myself by my name first, rather than as “Hugo’s mum” at preschool and other places to the parents of his peers.

For a little while now that the whole Mummy thing is starting tohas started feel suffocating. Not in a “walk out the door and never return” way, but I feel like I need something else. That until I actually have to get organised, I never will be. It’s obviously not going to happen overnight, and there’s almost no chance of me studying or working next year, but I am starting to think about what else I want to do with my life. I think it’s partly because I’m just sick of dealing with the “Is Daddy coming home tonight?” aspect combined with Sophie growing up and knowing that she’s really not a baby anymore, and there are no more babies on the horizon, so maybe, just maybe, I can start to spare some of my remaining mental capacity to something else.

Over the past six months I’ve become quite lazy with dinner time. What started as an occasional rug-picnic in the lounge-room gradually became dinner in front of the television more often than not, so we’ve gone back to strict “dinner at the table, no television, no toys, no wandering around” rules. Sophia is big enough now to sit at the table with Hugo but she just doesn’t sit still for a minute. So an average meal time looks something like this:

Hugo sits in his seat, eating miniscule mouthfuls and chewing each one eleventy billion times, to make sure he doesn’t accidently ingest something vaguely resembling a vegetable, other than the two pieces of vegetable I insist he eats, on threat of no fruit after dinner, which he gags on for ten minutes and eventually swallows down with half a cup of milk.

Sophia takes a gargantuan mouthful then jumps up and does circuits of the kitchen/dining room, picking things up and putting them down, studiously ignoring my commands to “Sit Down and Eat Your Dinner!”. I physically replace her in her chair, she stands up on her chair, takes another enormous mouthful, I repeat verbal command, and so on, ad nauseum. And I do mean nauseum.

My eyelid starts to tic. I bring out the big guns. “If. You. Don’t. Sit. And. Eat. Your. Dinner. You. Will. Go. To. Bed. HUNGRY”.

Silence … compliance? But then the first giggle escapes, it might be Hugo but it’s usually Sophie, and within microseconds they are both in hysterics LAUGHING AT ME. Eyelid tic rapidly become full facial twitch.

Any wonder my brain is custard some days?

And I’d also like to learn some photoshop techniques to make the images look a bit better.