From hospital to airport to prison

These holidays have been somewhat fraught, what with the incident involving our eldest junior recipe tester, his bike, the gutter, the ambulance, the surgery to put his arm back together... You know, it's created a bit of havoc. In short, we've had to postpone our trip across the ditch.

The junior has to go back to hospital to have wires removed from his arm. The wires are holding his arm together after he did a pretty good job of pulling it apart. Predictably, this procedure had to happen in the middle of the holiday. Something had to give. The trip copped it.

Not to be defeated, the senior recipe tester has done inordinate travel booking gymnastics and managed to change our flights so will still get to go. Just later.

Well, yesterday I stuffed it once and for all.

The juniors are, obviously, on school holidays. And so, to ease the pain of not being with their grandparents in New Zealand just yet, I decided to take them on an adventure. An adventure in this house involves three things: public transport, an ice-cream and more public transport. The transport of choice for yesterday's adventure was a bus.

Armed with sandwiches, drink bottles and fruit, we set off to picnic in a park we could get to by bus. The time and coordination required to get three bladders emptied and locate six shoes, preferably in matching pairs was akin to the organisation that went into the execution of D-day. But we did eventually get out the door.

We settled onto the bus seats and I held the backpack, now bulging with drink bottles and jumpers on my knee. Like many at our stage of life, the senior recipe tester and I have spent the national debt over the past number of years on junior sized drink bottles, looking for the holy grail. The one that doesn't leak.

So when I moved the backpack off my knee onto the floor I could but sigh at the soggy patch all over my jeans where, I assumed, a drink had leaked through the backpack. Until I realised it was not the drink bottles that had leaked. It was in fact the container of pineapple I had packed. I was covered in pineapple juice. I attracted every fly in the park.

The backpack was also soaked with pineapple juice. It is the same backpack I was planning to take with me to the airport, after I have finished at the hospital. It smells of fruit. A lot. Fruit leaving or entering airports causes the fruit dogs to get excited.

So, later, we will take a fruity backpack to the airport. I do not anticipate being let on a plane. My best hope is for a prison cell. My worst is a spot on a border security television show.