An exhaustingly drawn out night last night. I had stayed up until 9.30pm (oh god, that is so pathetic - don’t think I don’t know that my life has warped out of recognition) and had absent mindedly drunk almost all of a stubby of Coopers Sparkling Ale. We went out around midday yesterday to get our pictures taken for cloth nappy pimping posterity for the City of Casey, and then went for a bit walk in the Berwick Botanical Gardens.

Mostly, my experience of botanical gardens has been the one in Melbourne, which, I realised yesterday, are very old school - with plaques under almost all of the plants with their normal and Latin names. It’s also laid out quite formally. Not Berwick. The gardens are on the site of an old quarry, and quite a few of the tracks could be mistaken for gravel roads. We only saw one plant plaque - until we found the rose garden - where all the roses were very much asleep, but had names like Mister Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Iceberg, Clementine - but my absolute favourite was Ita Buttrose ITA BUTT-ROSE. I went hysterical for about five minutes, with PartyPie in the sling sleeping stoutly through my paroxysms.

Then we went out for lunch to a cafe that I’d been meaning to go to for ages - it was my last hope for Berwick. Last time I thought I’d found a great cafe there (in the old primary school buildings, opposite the park - a lovely setting) the size of the serves demonstrated a commitment to minimalism that did not stretch to their pricing. However, this little joint in the middle of an arcade served M the best coffee he’d had in a while - we both snarfed through a foccacia each, and then M polished off another coffee and I ate CAKE. Rapturously.

A bit more walking. Found Small Z another great beanie (as her visit to Binginwarri showed, she cannot have too many) in the op-shop, and then we went to the ‘recycled boutique’ where one of the ladies ooohed and aaahed over how much she had grown - we had taken her in there when she was about a month old and changed her in the back room under her watchful eighty-year-old eye. That was back when we didn’t really know how to do it… Then I introduced M to a place that could have been designed for us - a chemist WITH A CAFE! I love chemist shops (US readers - read ‘drugstore’) - I love their sale tables, their skincare products, their jellylbeans and their mounds of unnecessary baby crud.

I wandered around, taking all this in (with Small Z still sling sleeping) while M added to his ever increasing caffeine content in the cafe at the back. Fabulous! (We are short for fun out here in the sticks.) Stuffed baby, still asleep, into the car (huzzah!) and drove home via the doctors and post office. Why? Because I had to ask my doctor to write a letter to say I can’t fly so that the aeroplane company that I will never use again (that would be JETSTAR) will reimburse the money for our flights. The flights they would not let us reschedule (at any cost).

So I got to stand there in the little local post office while the postmaster (a name I don’t get to type very often) faxed the letter which basically said I was suffering post natal depression (my doctor was kind enough to write this after I told her on the phone that I could not fly to NSW as my sleep deprivation made the thought impossible, as did the state of my bank account). And now the entire local community thinks I had a ‘difficult birth’ and am stuck in a trench of post natal depression, neither of which are true.

Upon weighing it up I decided that saving over $300 is worth the misunderstanding and silent sympathetic looks in the supermarket. And now I have come to the main point of post. This morning, after breakfast, M looked at me consideringly and said;
“You know, you were really great to hang out with…yesterday.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I was ‘great to hang out with…yesterday’? What’s wrong with me today? I’ve barely been up an hour!.”

He scrambled to tell me that he had merely got his intonation wrong, and that he had meant to say;
“You know, you were GREAT to hang out with yesterday.”

Of course, then he couldn’t leave it alone and became increasingly creative.

“How about ‘You WERE great to hang out with yesterday’? Like you used to be great, but not anymore. Or, ‘YOU were great to hang out with yesterday.’ Like everyone else sucked?”

DISCLAIMER: Due to the fact that it has taken me three days to finish, the whole point of the post now kind of lacks that special zing. But the thought was there at its inception. Somewhere.