I need to cull our belongings. This is a truth universally known. But I am also a sentimentalist at heart. I know how you’re meant to get rid of things: ask do I wear them/use them/need them? Could someone else benefit from them? One or two yeses and out they go. Well, that’s all fine in theory. But in reality? There are more questions than that. Here are but two of the quandaries I have been wrestling with. Multiply this by a few hundred and you have an idea of why I am not

He wasn’t a bad baby to begin with, but about six months ago I began to hear tales from his mother about various crimes and misdemeanours for which he was responsible. First there was the broken wall near our local post office. ‘What happened here?’ May Blossom asked me. ‘It looks like someone might have driven into it,’ I told her. ‘Oh,’ she said, seriously. ‘That was Baby.’ ‘I didn’t know Baby had a car.’ ‘He doesn’t. He stole it.’ Well shit. After that, Baby morphed fairly

1. You have to stay somewhere as good or better than home. My very clever friend Other Jess once told me this, and I think she is right. Once you have a child, and probably until they are at least five, for a trip away to in any way resemble a holiday you need to stay somewhere this is not inferior to your own home. Staying in a crappy hotel when you are travelling in Mexico without kids is fine. You can eat out every meal, spend all day sightseeing, and just use it as a plac

Is it just the hair? On Play School Humpty’s hair is usually styled with a centre part, but the toy’s hair just wants to go to one side. When I do manage to part it he looks like Robert Smith from The Cure, which is definitely an improvement on Hitler. I hope I’m not seeing connections where there are none, but it is a bit strange that they both have six-letter names beginning with H, they both lived in countries with Walls and they both suffered downfalls. Make of these fact

Wild scenes: May Blossom out of control in the moshpit. Tip her over, pour her out. We’ve just returned from the Play School Concert. If you’re not from Australia, I ought to explain that Play School is a half-hour television program made and broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for pre-schoolers. It has been running since 1966. Each episode is hosted by two actors, appearing as themselves, and basically they mind your kid in a educational way for half an hour

But this squishy little flat will soon be a much-improved palace, because the Michael the Bathroom Man, Saviour of Hearts and Minds, is coming to see us on Saturday. He is going to quote on replacing our Emporium of Mould and Dryer Fluff with an actual bathroom. We might even get a toilet that flushes properly and that doesn’t have a wonky plastic seat so flimsily attached that if you don’t sit down very carefully you skid off the pan and out the door on it like it’s a bobsle

In the lead-up to May Blossom’s birthday, the cake preparations continue. Today’s post is an homage to some of the great cakes of my childhood. The first, and in my opinion the greatest, is my first birthday cake. It was made by my mother in the shape of my brown burmese cat, Quickly. It is not, as H assumed before I resized the image so he could see the cat’s face, a cake in the shape of Western Australia. It was served, as all the cakes were, on a massive brown plastic tray

Today I was going to start a series inspired by the lovely blog Soulemama, in which each Friday I would post a picture of a wonderful moment from the week past. I like this idea. It’s a gentle form of online gratitude. No words, just a solitary inspiring image. But while I experienced lots and lots of precious treasured moments this week — an ever increasing number of which involved me being asleep — I neglected to photograph them. You know, because I was participating in the