Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

After five months of humming and hawing, we've finally decided that in order to keep our collective sanity intact, we really do need to move out of our tiny treehouse. It has served it's purpose well; we have settled into our little community (by which I mean I know three people), the children are happy in their school, and the beautiful surroundings have provided a dramatic backdrop for our introduction to life in Australia. However, the truth is that pretty as it is, the house is really not much more than a glorified apartment, something which really doesn't work for a family of seven (albeit with the largest member absent two thirds of the time). It offers so little privacy that when I shower the children tend to gather in the bathroom to ask me questions through the misty glass (the bathroom door doesn't close) and our living room also serves as a kitchen/dining/dressing/occasional-conjugal-quickie-before-the-children-notice-room (there's no pri...

So we’re into the home stretch thank goodness. And with the end in sight it is normal for the heavily pregnant female to resort to ‘ nesting’ , an instinctual phenomena characterised by sudden spurts of cleaning and organising of her habitat in preparation for the new arrival. This manifestation is an early indication that labour is imminent. I have my own personally adapted version of this phenomenon. I call it ‘ hoarding ’ and it is characterised by the frantic buying of clothes that I can wear on the other side . I’ve been trawling the Boden sale all week filling my virtual trolly with gorgeous items that will hopefully goad me into actually fitting into them as soon as possible.  And last week I made a special trip to the Dubai Outlet mall with the pretense of treating the children to an hours play in the creche.  In reality I was on a mission to buy something gorgeous in Monsoon . It was disappointing to be honest but I still managed to...

I've had bloggers block.  I think my brain atrophied and died slightly over the festive season from the massive consumption of alcoholic beverages I consumed.  It's not my fault; Ireland was so cold that anything more ambitious than sitting in front of the fire in a pub drinking hot whiskeys seemed sheer madness.  My brain was further destroyed by the return trip from hell which featured an ill-advised stopover in Istanbul, something which I quickly told myself would be an experience when I saw the cost of the flights (half that of a direct flight).  The reality was something similar to childbirth in terms of the cyclical agony as the children ran the wrong way down the travelator in the departure lounge, over and over and over... Predictably our plane was delayed,  and so as everyone gathered around the departures screen anxiously scanning it for updates, we started pushing our way to the priority boarding point to avail of our right to board first since we...