I’m not sure where it is now, perhaps it slid down into the back of the couch or is hiding in the back of the toy cupboard or is squashed underneath the TV cabinet. All I know is that now it goes off at 5:30am and at that hour I am never inclined to hunt for it and so it goes each morning. So thank you dear, lovely friends for your thoughtful gift, as soon as I hear that you are pregnant I will begin the search for the most noisy repetitive loud toy to give to your child as I too am a lovely friend.

The only upside to his adoration to the Big Bird puppet is that I have control over what Big Bird says and often Big Bird likes clean rooms and boys to have naps. Just a warning to you mothers, puppets seem like a fun idea for kids but you have to know in advance that you will be the primary puppeteer and therefore be stuck with an extra appendage until the phase is over which hopefully is not too long.

No sooner had I finished then Wrigglebot decided  to help me put away some things, two minutes later half a container of sugar was on my nice clean floor. I wasn’t flustered, I just calmly swept it up and continued putting things away. Two minutes later I was loading the dishwasher when Squirm opened the cupboard pulled out the sugar and poured the remainder onto the ground. Now I was starting to get a little frustrated but I calmly cleaned it up. Just after lunch I changed Squirms nappy, she escaped as usual and before I could catch her she did a poo on the carpet. I was calm no longer, she hastily got cleaned up and put in bed and I set about cleaning the carpet. See that’s what I don’t like about cleaning, it never remains, it is futile. Nothing gold lasts.

So cute, you say, and yet it all has one massive drawback. He has discovered killer dinosaurs and monsters in nightmares. He was waking up terrified and refusing to go back to sleep at two o’clock in the morning. Having gotten used to full nights of sleep I was devastated but it only seemed to last a week and now he sleeps with his own stuffed pet dinosaur, a sword and a cricket bat. It may be uncomfortably crowded in his bed but those monsters stand no chance now.

As we rolled out of the driveway I said, ‘Husband, do you want me to look at a map?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘This is a road trip we will just feel our way along and end up wherever we end up.’

‘Ok’, I said being the supportive wife I am.

We gave Wrigglebot some toys to play with, we put some air in the tyres, put the music on, (Husband had prepared a special play list just for this road trip) and we hit the open road. The point of road trips in my view is to avoid main roads and highways as much as possible so we ventured out toward the country and eventually after winding through some gorgeous country and rainforests we ended up at Blackwood which is very beautiful and very cold.

Here we found a little old style restaurant with a roaring fire, good food and an old style lolly shop. We had a late lunch and then headed home. There wasn’t anything remarkable about the day, it didn’t cost much money it was just nice to be together. Oh, and for the record about half an hour into the trip Husband asked me to pull out the map.

I thought this was a nice little anecdote but I didn’t realise how true it was till Wrigglebot came along. Wrigglebot is only nine months old yet whenever a truck, particularly the garbabe truck, comes down our street he rushes to the window and watches it with a big smile. Later in life Wrigglebot may decide that he wants to be a politician or an author or a policeman, it doesn’t matter, but for now I think if he could choose anything it would be to sit there all day and look at trucks and big machinery.

As the curtain came down at the end my body was shaking and I had tears streaming down my face, unlike any other musical I have seen this one made me feel what the characters were feeling. The stranger sitting next to me, who had taken up his seat as well as half of mine, was surreptitiously wiping tears from his face as well. That alone told me that this musical was connecting with people because it is not often that you see a 60 year old balding man cry in public.

I don’t think I would have cried, let alone sobbed, pre-baby, not that I am not an emotional person but because having a baby allowed me to better understand  Kim, the main character. As much as you can intellectually understand the love between a mother, or parent, and their child you really can’t fathom the depth of the connection until you have your own baby and then you understand that when mothers say they would die for their children they really would.

A great present that we used at Christmas time, but would be great for Mother’s Day, was a personalised album from albumprinter.com.au. It was really easy, we downloaded the software inserted our pictures into the project, put words in and then uploaded it and we had it within a week. The beauty of this particular program was that we were free to customise it however we wanted and so we made ours like a picture story book, ‘The story of Oxford… so far.’ To say that the grandparents liked it was an understatement, we have strangers coming up to us in the street telling us how much they liked our book.

Last year I was thinking that the degree of Mother’s Day presents and pampering should be based on the particular mother’s job performance for the past year; for example, if your kids are grown and no longer living at home perhaps you get a card and flowers if you have three kids under the age of three then you deserve a massage, breakfast in bed, expensive presents, meals cooked for you, basically the whole day to yourself. Now, however, I have been through pregnancy, birth and the first eight months of Wrigglebot’s life and say that mothers should get all the pampering possible on Mother’s Day for the rest of their lives based solely on the fact that they have undergone pregnancy, birth and sleepless nights.

So… husband if you are reading this, in appreciation of my job performance and in recognition of my commitment to the job of motherhood, I was thinking a bag for my laptop would be great.

Anyways it was to my great advantage that husband had just watched ‘The 300′ so he was all about exhibiting his manhood and being as ‘spartanesque’ as possible. All it took were a few key questions like ‘Do you think you could move those boulders or should we wait for someone to help?’ and he would jump to it, flexing his muscles, deep down I think he wanted to take his shirt off and don a red cape but luckily he refrained. And so by the end ot two days Ford was playing in the sand and eating snail shells blissfully happy. This brings me to my idea I don’t think many people will take this one up but I think a dummy with straps so that it cannot come out of his mouth would be very handy. Think about it before you dismiss it, this way he couldn’t put bark, sand , bugs, anything in his mouth when it was strapped on. Hmmm.

So having pretty much finished after the two days it was great to be able to look out and see it done. So often my days consist of doing all of the same things and so nothing gets completed because it just needs to be done again tomorrow. Change his nappy it needs to be done again in a few hours and again tomorrow, feeding never gets accomplished, vacuuming and cleaning are a recurring cycle and play is never ending. I’m not complaining about these things, some I quite enjoy, they are my lot in life for now but all the same it was nice to have a project on the weekend and get it done. And now I can look out my window at my fake grass and smile.