Weekdays at Home

Have I mentioned how much I hate living in a flat? Have I?

For a start, you can hear other people going to the toilet, and my god, some people wee for such a long time and I lie there thinking they must have drunk a whole vase of water because you can get out of bed and put your ugg boots on and go feeling about for your jam-jar specs in the time it takes them to finish (unless you've actually slept in your boots, as I did last week because I was so cold - bad, but not as bad as sleeping in a coat and balaclava in particularly nippy student digs in Southampton).

Secondly, the sitting room is every room. It's the study and the hall, Ella's playroom and the laundry. It's where we hang our coats (on the back of the chairs) and where we dry towels on the radiator. Having built a living kitchen for the specific purpose of separating annoying plastic toys from tasteful nick nacks (and yes, I'm including my Qantas 747 airfix model in that), I find the array of crap strewn across our living space particularly hard to deal with at times.

Thirdly, you never get a lie-in, not even when it's your turn, because the bedrooms are directly off the sitting room and the fracas created by a two year old dragging a potty across laminate floor has to be heard to be believed (and when she's not doing that she's shouting "mummy" every ten minutes or so). Thus every day begins sometime around 6am and there's not a day goes by when I don't lament the fact we're not living in the house we designed with all of this in mind.

You can probably guess from my mood that it was my turn for the phantom lie-in this morning, which meant I was actually up at 6.20 rather than 6.00. And when I did get up, I caught Darren hand-feeding Qantas (our resident cockatoo) on the balcony, not with the enormous box of Whistler bird seed, but by picking all the almonds out of the trail mix we sprinkle on our cereal, the very thing he's told me off for doing, even sending me text messages about it (something along the lines of stop picking the best bits out of that bag of trail mix for the cockatoo - they're mine).

Afterwards, I reluctantly went off to the gym, you know, the one upstairs in the shopping mall, where a very fat man dressed from head to toe as Captain Cook was attracting quite a bit of attention as he stood in the queue at the salad bar. And when I got to the gym, I realised I'm in the wrong job because for $80 an hour I could sit on the floor next to the rowing machines watching Sky News and offering occasional words of encouragment to people who want a personal trainer, you know, things like that's right, keep it up, and only three more strokes and counting up to a hundred, all of which are easily within my capabilites.

Anyway, it's good when Darren has time off in the week, one of the advantages of being a chopperdoc, and with the sun shining we had a barbeque lunch on the balcony before heading off to kick a ball around Centennial Park. And then he went off for an on-call shift and Ella waved him goodbye with a song;

Dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner
Dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner
Batman!

"My Daddy's a Batman" she said when I was getting her out of the bath. "And Mummy helps people to talk". She's got it all sussed, but I've no idea who taught her the song.