Expelled

Friday 2nd March

We went to the library group after all, but only because I couldn’t really justify the vodka at 10am. The library is on the first floor of the local shopping mall and the timing clashed with an early parenting group, so we had to queue along a corridor to use the hot and sweaty lifts with all the other pushchairs.

Transporting a pushchair around shopping centres leaves you indignant when able bodied people use the lift because without a pushchair, I’d use the stairs. I am beginning to wonder whether it’s an Australian thing because my great aunt in Perth will circle a car park five times to grab a space next to the entrance. She claims this is because she is diabetic, which is true, but I have personally witnessed her stealing pick and mix sweets from the Coles supermarket in Rockingham, so I am inclined to believe she’s just lazy.

The library group was a disaster. One of the librarians turned up and ushered the kids into an annexe room where she had them sit on a mat for a story about a hippo. Ella got bored and started jumping up and down and trying to pull hairclips from the older girls, who looked to their mothers for reassurance. She graduated to hopping between the kids blowing raspberries and shouting “I jumping, I jumping” and then to mauling sleeping babies in pushchairs while their helpless mothers looked on from across the room. The more I tried to restrain her the more she resisted.

After the story, the librarian dimmed the lights and projected an Angelina Ballerina DVD onto the wall, which was Ella’s cue to start dancing in any available space, twirling herself round and round (still blowing enormous raspberries) and shouting “I dancing”.

Eventually the librarian said loudly “Can anyone hear Angelina Ballerina with all this noise?”, which I thought was incredibly rude. However, we are guests in this country, so I bit my lip, went onto the mat and removed Ella by the arm, took her outside and strapped her into her buggy. Her protests drew the attention of the other people in the library, who simply glared at me.

One of the other mums leaned out of the door. “Don’t feel you have to go, it’s not the opera house, it doesn’t matter if she makes a noise”. I appreciated the sentiment but that wasn’t how it seemed so we set off to the park instead, where Ella got herself told off by and old man for throwing bark chippings onto the slide. By lunchtime she was back in the shower, covered in soil and chicken sandwiches, her clothes in the linen basket and her shoes drying on the balcony. It’s a whole lot of effort for a mornings work.