Mini Eggs

This morning we joined Yvonne and Cate at what they call "the ball pool". I'd call it a "soft play cafe". There are loads of these at home, but having such marvellous weather, Sydney doesn't have many options to entertain the kids when it's raining.

Not that it was raining today. No, it was the usual twenty-something degees and far too sticky, though Darren appears to have acclimatised because he moved the fan to my side of the bed last night, complaining it's making him chilly. He won't let me have the air-con switched on overnight. I'm sure the heat is attracting the roaches.

There are two soft play cafes in the whole of the city, to my knowledge. One of them is at Fox Studios and it costs $17 to get in. Apparently it's booked out on a rainy day and you have to put your name down for it first thing in the morning. The one at Marrickville is less well known, and the mums who go there like to keep it that way. Having been invited along, I've been sworn not to tell anyone else about it, which means I've immediately told Niamh Dawson's mum it's precise location. That's what sisterhood is about.

Ella loves the ball pool, it has four slides, two bouncy castles (one of which I've tried out when the staff weren't looking) and a machine that throws balls up into the air for the kids to catch. You have to be pretty agile to keep up with Ella as she still needs help to get up and down the different levels. Having been to the gym for two consecutive days, my abdominal muscles were aching, so dropping through holes and hauling myself here and there made me wince. Once she was up onto the second level I could finally get a coffee and have a chat with Cate and Yvonne.

Twelve months after arriving from the UK, Cate is still finding it hard to make friends with Aussie mums. Yvonne is the only one she's found easy to get to know, and Yvonne isn't a Sydneysider, she's from Brisbane. "I met a girl at playgroup, she said she also had the same trouble, but she turned out to be the kid's nanny, not her mum" said Cate. "I've invited her here today but I don't know whether she'll turn up, with us being, you know, older mums". I looked straight at Cate but couldn't work out whether she was including me in that. She's seven years older than I am. I'm choosing to ignore it.

Yvonne, it turns out, is a whizz with Australian history. She has loads of books on the subject and says I can borrow them any time I like, which I'm chuffed to bits with. She's also recommended some of the museums downtown, which saves me trawling through the more boring ones. I could have chatted to her for ages but Ella fell into somebody else's vomit on the trampoline so we had to go home.

This afternoon we had to collect a parcel from the post office. The post office in Randwick is upstairs in the shopping mall. It shares many characteristics with post offices back home; the queues are very long, they move very slowly, and the person in front of you always wants to do some complicated and time-consuming transaction when you just want to buy a stamp or post a parcel. If I were prime minister, the first new legislation to be passed would be a smart card to enable fast, efficient people to bypass post office queues. This is a good enough reason for me not to go into politics. I'm one of Thatcher's children. We make Mussolini look like a moderate.

Anyway, the parcel was from my mother-in-law. It was the point and shoot digital camera we forgot to bring. I read the customs note on the back of the parcel, which said "Contents: Camera, Sweets". Suspecting Cadbury's, I ripped the whole box open as soon as we left the shop. Inside were two packages of mini-eggs. So there I was, standing outside the post office, bits of cardboard and bubble-wrap and sellotape all over the place. I put the packaging into the nearest bin and stuffed the mini-eggs into the hood of Ella's pram while quickly calculating that I'd have to own up to having received them. This would mean saving half for Darren but giving none to Ella, who might feasibly choke on them. Afterwards, I went to Coles and bought her a Milky Way to appease my guilt.

Bad, bad mummy. Delicious eggs. Thanks Kate.