And we were going so well

The evening held promise. After an unsatisfactory start to the day, following an evening of vomitous ruination the night before, the pleasant winter afternoon sun and family time at the beach boded well for a smooth lead-in to the week ahead.

Vomitous ruination was not, by the way, because my wife and I have joined a Roman orgy re-enactment society or are finally getting invitations to those sorts of parties, it's because our three year old either caught something unpleasant, ate something disagreeable, swapped spit with a dog or ... [removed in the interests of public decency]  and decided to share it with us over the course of the night.

In consequence, we spent most of the morning bringing the house up to the WHO standards for disease containment and control, washing or sanitising drinkware, flatware, silverware, Tupperware, manchester, dorchester and cheem. 

By lunchtime, the place smelt of disinfectant, the children were shining bright having had a layer of skin removed by the scrubbing brush and we were finally able to remove the ET containment tent from around the house.

The afternoon was going well. A family visit to the beach, a certain amount of amateur soccer, small talk with passers by and some odd experiments in photography seemed to indicate that we were on final approach to the week ahead with flaps down, landing gear engaged and all passengers returned to their seats with their seat belts securely fastened and their tray tables in the upright position.

And we got cocky and tried to do something clever, didn't we? Couldn't just let the whole afternoon run on autopilot. Sure, 13 year old daughter and 10 year old son, you can go up ahead of us. You're old enough now to cover the necessary 100m unsupervised.

There's just something subtle about the build-up in the writing that lets you know that the crisis point in this narrative is approaching, isn't there?

The 13 year old, flexing her fledgling independence and unwilling to be seen too much with parents so uncool that they still think Facebook is a good idea, wanted to head home with her brother,  leaving the very young and very old to fend for each other. But she had no house keys.  Arriving home with her brother, sans keys, she decided she needed to scale the crumbling masonry of the side fence and get into the backyard and, thence, in through a back door.

And the crumbling masonry lived up to its name. Down came the bricks - cradle and all - onto her left foot. 

Credit at this point to my 10 year old who held his calm, got into the house, got his sister into the house where we found her 5 minutes later, on the couch with an ice pack on a bruise that was certainly going to result in some awkward questions from a child support worker.

So my wife is off to the hospital and I'm left with the three boys, ready to demonstrate how smoothly I can superdad the evening onto the tarmac and in to a complete stop at the terminal.

Then the wings fell off. 

Baths seemed like a good first idea. 6 year old bathed? Check. 10 year old next? Uncheck. He's lost a Halo man that he'd been building up to buying for three weeks. So he's doing his vengeful Viking god impersonation, handing out lightning bolts, hammers and blame left and right. A Halo man, if you've never seen one, is just on 1 inch tall so if you imagine looking for a needle in a haystack in a thunderstorm while wearing a pointy, metallic helmet, you're not too far left of my experience at this stage of the narrative.

Now,  like most 10 year old males,  my son has a clinically diagnosed allergic reaction to tidiness. It's worse than nuts.  Traces of nuts are enough to trigger breathing difficulties in sufferers but even talking about tidy is enough to require an adrenalin shot and paramedics with my son. However,  it seemed like the easiest way for Thor to find the needle - and to protect the innocent from his wrath -  so I locked the god in a 4m × 4m room and told him to get tidying. And put the ambulance on standby. 

It was also a ploy to perhaps to return some regularity to the glide path.

But no. At this point, I discover that the 3 year old has been taking head lice on agistment for all his little school friends. In fact there is now so much carbon sequestered in these creatures that he can claim emissions trading credits.  Anyone ever tried to put a fine-tooth comb through a 3 year old's hair? Now I'm looking for a needle in a haystack in a thunderstorm with my mate Benjamin Franklin while fighting off a werewolf armed only with a comb in the other hand.

And I vow and declare that if I find the parents of those other kids, I will eviscerate them with that very comb.

At this point,  Thor bursts forth and,  in a voice like unto thunder,  says "It's not anywhere" and storms off to the lounge room to wreak his wroth on any Norse shipping that happened to be passing.

Thankfully for the Royal Danish Navy, they didn't have too many units stationed off the east Australian coast this evening so an international incident was averted.

Shipping will, however,  feature in the rest of my evening as Thor - once he finds his treasure and returns to human form - has a speech to write about the First Fleet and a significant personage attached thereunto. If I manage to achieve that,  I'll have added magician to my existing titles of warrior supreme, airline captain and short order cook of emergency dinners.

And, if I die tonight,  bugger smooth landings on runway 3, I want winged horses, I want busty contraltos and I want Valhalla - with all the quaffing that those things imply.