Goal

We didn’t have the greatest welcome to Noosa. The skies were clear as we approached, then Maroochydore airport came into view, and with it a very ominous cloudbank. Has nobody told the weatherman this is the Sunshine Coast?

By the time we landed, Ella resembled a child who’d flown to Noosa via Afghanistan, you know, all sticky-palmed and dirty-faced and pacing the floor with a heart-shaped lollipop like a caged animal. The situation isn’t helped by the fact we’re growing her fringe out and she keeps removing the hair slides, which leaves her hair dangling into her eyes like a street child of Sao Paolo.

You’d think travelling with children gets easier as they get older, but there seems to be this bit in the middle where they’re too old to sleep on journeys and too young to play happily with a Nintendo. Unfortunately for us, our year down under coincides exactly with this stage in Ella’s development and plane rides of any duration require gin for us and jelly snakes for Ella, even breakfast flights.

I’d like to say all kids are the same and most of them probably are, but we always manage to find ourselves sitting alongside some family of highly fragrant children, like little Leora and her parents who were seated in the row ahead of us yesterday. Leora was the sort of kid who could wear white and pastel pinks without looking grubby. Her mother had already fixed me with a look when she saw me bribing Ella with the jelly snakes during take-off, so once we were up in the air, I counterbalanced this by producing a new Wiggles magnets set, thus levelling the scores at 1-1.

However, after half time she retaliated with a Tupperware box of sliced apple, which was twice as irritating because we’d set off that morning with a Tupperware box of strawberries and blueberries but Ella had already snaffled the lot (strawberries and blueberries being worth far more than apples in the yummy mummy stakes).

By now I was trailing 2-1 and after I pulled out the cookie I’d bought at the airport, things slid to 4-1, from which I thought I’d never recover (that’s one minus point for the cookie and another for the fact I bought it at the airport).

The clincher came in extra time though, because while Ella prepared for landing (jelly snake in each hand; another hanging from the corner of her mouth), little Leora began her wailing and stomping. Call it underhanded, but I reached into my bag and pulled out an orange one and with the greatest satisfaction you can imagine, dangled it in her father’s face through the gap in the seats. I knew her mother wouldn’t go for the snake. Dads are much more of a pushover.

She shoots, she scores.