I know other people's dreams are boring, but I am impossibly dull.

The other night I dreamt that I was on holiday with the family-of-four-boys-five-and-under.

And their pet panda.

Yes. You read that right.

Their larger than life pet panda. He was built like a brick shithouse: think Jonah Lomu, double him in size, chop off his legs, imagine concrete has a high nutritional value and understand that is his food of choice, add some razor sharp long ninja-like claws, now cover him in black and white fur and you'll start to get the picture.

Needless to say I was a little dubious about this panda. Especially as I needed to get past him to get a book to read to one of the boys, and he also had his eye on one of the books.

'Don't worry about him, he's harmless,' assured Father-of-four-boys-five-and-under.

But I knew otherwise, I knew that that panda had the ability to turn me into sashimi or gently squash me to death and get out of it by it by claiming he was only giving me a bear hug.

And then the dream ended.

I text the short version of the dream to the Mother-of-four-boys-five-and-under.

'Were we having a nice holiday?' She text back.

'You were having a lovely old time. But I wouldn't trust that bear as far as I could kick the fucker.' I replied.

Last night I was around the Family-of-four-boys-five-and-under and Mother-of said to me, 'Oh my god, you have no idea what the five year old came home with.'

She said he came home from school yesterday, 'Mummy, Mummy - look what I did today!'

Yup, you guessed right.

It was a picture of that panda bear.

And the five year old hadn't heard about my dream.

That bear is messing with my head.

I want a blue one.

I was going to bang on about the Bioethics Council recommending that parents get the right to choose the sex of their unborn babies. And I sort of still will, but it will be the abbreviated version as I've got another morning talk up my sleeve.

I think choosing the sex of your unborn child is just creepy. The Bioethic's Council justify it by saying that sex selection would be for social reasons of 'family balancing.' Excuse me while I gak in the nearest pot plant, but how designery, perfect is that? Next it will be 'I want a curly brown haired, green eyed, musical, rocket scientist' despite the fact that the rest of the family are blond haired, blue eyed, as musical as banana cake and all possess IQs in single figures.

Or 'We were really going for the Spanish look, you know something a little more exotic?' I'm sorry, but if you want an exotic looking child, go shag a Spaniard.

And then it's only a small jump before the circus families are ordering four armed dwarfs because it would be good for business.

I was discussing this with my friend, the mother-of-four-boys-five-years-and-under. Now she would have dearly loved a girl somewhere along the way. She was particularly sure number three and four were going to be boys. But despite this, her view is that you end up with what you can cope with. And I reckon she is right. Out of all the people I know, her and her husband would be the people I would vote for having to raise four boys. They don't sweat the small stuff.

The other part of my morning talk I am quite excited about. When I bought my house last year it didn't take me long at all to get stuff on the wall. I hauled my-friend-the-antiques-dealer in and he kindly hung nearly all of my pictures for me (in between muttering things like, 'Why do you have to having fucking three of everything?')

He also pointed out that pretty much all of my wall space has been pretty well taken up. There's not a lot of real estate left for the picture market in my house these days. Except for the dunny. I had been unsure what to do with it. And until yesterday was stark white. I had thought of plastering it in maps of countries I have visited, and when I went into the map shop yesterday I discovered that the maps they had were so huge, that I would only manage to get three countries on the walls.

Then I came up with another idea, I would turn my loo into my travel scrap book. I have to confess I've slaughtered an atlas in the decoration of the dunny, but only the countries I've been to. Soon I'm going to stick up labels of which photos belong to which country.

Let me introduce you to my loo.



It's still work in progress, there's a whole lot of photos to go yet and it's possibly only interesting to me, but it was one hell of an entertaining way to spend a cold Saturday afternoon.

I suppose this post brings new meaning to 'toilet traffic.'

Is that a young innocent brain I can mess with?

I was over at the household of four-boys-aged-five-and-under the other night during jungle hour. I always enjoy jungle hour in their house, it's really entertaining to join the food chain and the bath chain (and I always get to leave at the end of it). At one point three of the four were destroying the bathroom while their mother and I slowly cleared some of the debris from the toy box(which had appeared to have exploded) in the room they had just been chased from.

'Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmm! Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmm!' Was being bellowed from the bath.

Mother-of-four looks at me, rolls her eyes, and says quietly, 'Oh shut up ya bunch of neanderthals.' I just love how she views her children. I don't think I would even be able to coax a 'delightful neanderthals' out of her mouth, either. There are no pedestals for her children to sit on in that household, only stools. Which is a good thing, because if they were put on pedestals, it would be guaranteed they'd fall off and break their sweet little neanderthal necks.

A period of time later, as the other three were in various stages of being tucked up and read stories to, I was downstairs with the five-year-old helping him build a paper dart. I tend to skite a bit about my paper dart skills, (six weeks in hospital flat on my back, total bed rest, what else is a girl going to do, but learn how to turn her menus into finely tuned flying machines.)

However we were following some instructions to make this particular dart, they were written in English and Chinese. One instruction said, 'Fold corners to corners, ' (there were also little diagrams, so I didn't have to be completely psychic).

'Look at the Chinese.' Said the five-year-old.

'Fo-ole cor-nar to cor-nar.' I announced in my finest Chinese accent.

'Wow, do you know Chinese?' Asked the five-year-old.

'Uh-huh.' I said and continued to say out loud all the other instructions in what is, in fact, a truly awful Chinese accent.

The five-year-old thought I was terribly flash, informed his parents of my fabulous Chinese language skills, and I then took my smug bilingual self off home.

The next morning the phone rang, it was the five-year-old's mother. Apparently he had just been telling his younger brother about how I had been teaching him Chinese, and he wanted to demonstrate his skills to me.

'Cor-nar'.

'Oh wow Five-Year-Old! That's fantastic! Next time I come round I will teach you Indian.'

'Can you tell me some Indian, now?'

'Of course, goodmorninggoodmorninggoodmorning.' (You have to understand that I was woggling my head at the same time.)

'Now, say it back to me.'

'Good morning good morning good morning.'

I have to admit, it was quite a good pronunciation. 'Fantastic work! I will teach you more soon.'

'Okay, bye Katelastname.'

I chuckled away and put down the phone.

About five minutes later the phone rang again - it was the five-year-old's mother and she couldn't stop laughing, 'Five-Year-Old has just said that each day they have to say good morning in class, and that they are allowed to say it in a different language if they want. He had decided this morning he was going to say it Indian.'

'Oh fuck. We can't actively make him look like an imbecile.'

'No', she giggled, 'I have put him right on this one.'

As I put the phone down I remembered that this was the same brain who I told last year, that if he wanted something from his mother, he just needed to work on his delivery. If he wanted chips saying, 'Mum, you hot thing, can I have some chippies please?', was going to work much more in his favour than whining away 'Mum, I want some chips.'

I know that morsel of information managed to sink in because about a week later his mother rang me in complete stitches after she'd heard him just say to his father, 'Dad, you hot thing, can I have a ride on the digger?'

Very soon this child is going figure out that ninety-nine percent of what comes out of my mouth is complete rubbish, however until such time I shall exploit his young innocent brain to the best of my ability.

I reckon I've got about another month left.

Please don't fall in with the giant eels.

Recently the Parents-of-Four-Boys-Six-and-Under were out of town for the weekend, so I volunteered to spend an afternoon in charge of three of the four. (The had wisely farmed out the Miniature Drunk to someone who knows out to look after infants).

Off we went to a wildlife park, which was very entertaining for me, except I think it was like going on an outing with the Fun Police for the boys.

'Can you lift up the (insert: big, fluffy, exotic) rabbit?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'I don't see any signs saying "Feel free to pick up and pat the rabbit"'.

'Huh?'

I bent down and whispered, 'I don't think you're allowed to pick up the rabbit.'

' Dad does.'

A few animals later.

'Can we go down there?'

'No, it says staff only.'

'I'm staff!'

'You're four.'

Just before we were about to leave I text Mother-of. 'Had a lovely old time at the park, unfortunately I arrived with three boys and it appears I am leaving with two boys and a chocolate ice cream - formerly known as The Three Year Old.'

A few days later Mother-of said she heard this conversation go on in the car.

Three Year Old: ' I lub Katelastnamewithlisp.'

Four Year Old: 'Are you going to marry her?'

Three Year Old:'Yes.'

Four Year Old: 'Why?'

Three Year Old: 'Because I lub her.'

When you hear things like that, it just makes me wish they wouldn't ever grow up. However I think their mother would disagree, I would imagine that she is looking forward to the time when the Three Year Old no longer does stuff like swallow a fifty cent piece so his brother doesn't get his hands on it.

I find genes such fascinating things. Or, I should say, what happens when you mix up two sets of genes. It constantly surprises me how, when you mix up two sets of genes that you always get such different results. Time after time after time. If it was me inventing the world I reckon I would have said, ‘The first three will be all different, but after that they will just start repeating.’

I was with my friend the mother-of-four-boys last week and we were discussing this as her freshest boy was drooling on my shoulder. She thinks her number one is a nerd, number two will go to any lengths to be cool, number three is just an out-there giggling nutjob (I arrived around there last night to find number three chasing the peanut butter around the kitchen, as you do) and number four has a startling resemblance to number one. ‘It’s kind of like breeding dogs, really,’ she commented.

I love watching the people my nieces and nephew are growing in to. Fortunately my sister and brother both married musical types because there was no way their children were going to inherit a large sense of rhythm from either them. (One of my mother’s school reports says, ‘The Fruitcake cannot sing. It is not that she does not sing, it is simply that she cannot sing.’ And at my nephew’s christening I was sitting beside my father in the church. We stood up for the first hymn – and just to get this straight, so appalling is my voice that I don’t even pretend to sing – and beside me my father started to tunelessly butcher the hymn. I looked down at where he had the hymn book open and saw that IT WAS ON THE WRONG PAGE.)

However one thing my parents are polar opposites on is technology. Growing up, I think the most common thing I ever heard said about my father was that that he loved gadgets. I was talking about this to my sister and she pointed out that Dad had a fax, email, laptop and mobile phone before any of his children. He even had Sky installed before it was physically possible to get it in the area.

This is the man who (before he became an arms dealer) was one of the first people in the country to have a pregnancy tester for sheep. During the eighties he featured twice on technology television shows with his latest farming wizardry.

My mother, on the other hand, is still delighted that they’ve invented this new thing called the abacus. We got an email from our father some years’ ago, ‘Your mother is having a bad week, she has a new mobile phone and a new car. She isn’t coping very well.’

My sister has inherited my father’s love of gadgets. But she has kept this trait reasonably well hidden, it wasn’t until she was teaching me how to use my digital camera that I worked this out. ‘How do you know all this shit?’ I was baffled. She might as well have been talking Polish to me. Her husband rolled his eyes and asked, ‘Have you met your father?’

My brother is quite good on gadgets as well. Or being able to work out how things work. However it appears this character trait seems to have eluded me. When I got my hard drive DVD recorder I used to have to bribe people to come around for dinner just so they could teach me how to use it. I like looking at it, and I like the idea of being able to make it do what it’s built for, but I find reading the instruction manual about as fun as doing my GST return.

Despite this, I remain convinced I must have some sort of gadget ability in me somewhere and I have been trying to channel it this week. I bought a new landline phone and oh my, it’s sexy. It doesn’t have buttons, it’s black, sleek and has a blue back light.

And the world was really working on my side the day I bought it, as they had advertised it wrongly and I got it for nearly half of its retail price.

Sadly, this state-of-the-art piece of technology does have a down side - it comes with a manual that makes War and Peace look like a piece of light reading. It does things that I don’t really think a phone needs to do and chances are, unless I invite one of my family to stay, it will only ever get to do twenty percent of the tasks that it’s designed to do.

Sigh.

Brainy phone, delinquent owner.

If my phone was a dog, it would possibly end up at the pound.

And finally, for dessert....

And just when you thought a girl has had enough holidays, she takes off for another couple of days. I like to think of it as a pudding holiday, if you will.

I joined the family of four-boys-aged-six-and-under for a spot of camping. Or, I should say, as they terrorised the camping ground. It was quite magnificent. The boys are six, four, three and then there's the Miniature Drunk. He's just over a year old and has only recently discovered what his legs can do, so kept us entertained stumbling about the place like a giggling buffoon while we did our best to stop him from eating things with the equivalent nutritional value to a cigarette butt. He also came in handy when we were playing beach cricket. We had one wicket and the other wicket was where ever Miniature Drunk was. It was a great addition to the game. I think NZ Cricket should adopt it, it would make test matches a hell of a lot more fun to watch.

When you think about it, camping is a strange thing to do. It's like devolving (is that the opposite to evolving?). What would our great-great-great-great-great grandparents' think of the fact that we have got to a point when we would actively chose to make life a lot more difficult for ourselves and then call it a holiday.

'Why would anyone go camping?' Laughed Mother-of as we lugged an enormous plastic bin full of dirty dishes to the kitchen facility on the other side of the camping ground to stand in line to wait for a sink to become free so we could then wash our arsenal of dishes.

Thinking seems to be back to front when camping. I'm more likely to fly to the moon than walk down the street in my jim jams, yet I will happily trek about five hundred metres passed total strangers in my jammies to get to the shower block (to stand in line to wait to pay $2 for four minutes worth of shower).

Yesterday morning I stumbled out of my tent, bleary eyed, looking like the wreck of the Hesperus (you could have probably found a bird nesting in my hair) to discover the three-year-old was standing outside my tent. He looked up me and with a very serious face said, 'You're bootifwul, Katelastnamewithalisp.'

My wee heart melted.

Oh, how I love camping.

Snap! UPDATED !

Last week my phone rang, 'Just thought you'd like to know that it's 32 degrees here, I've just selected which fish is about to lose its life and become my lunch and I'm having a beer.'

'You're a bastard, Dad.'

'Heh heh. Back on Sunday, talk to you then, bye!'

My father was in Bangkok *working*.

Okay, that sentence looks slightly sifty. He was actually working, arms dealers need conferences, didn't you know?

When he got back he was telling me that on the last day he went on a canal trip and then went and checked out the Grand Palace - where he bumped into two friends of his.

Of course he did.

So in a country that is about fifteen hours in a plane away from New Zealand, in a city with a population of around nine million, my father managed to bump into people he knew? Okay it was at a major tourist attraction, so that would bring chances down somewhat, but hell, that's quite a coincidence.

Or is it?

I was pondering this and when I trawled through my memory archive I discovered a few other wee coincidental pearlers lurking in dusty corners of my brain.

When we went to Malaysia I announced to the crew that the competition for the trip was to see who bumped into someone they knew.

The boys rolled their eyes a sighed a collective, 'Yeah right, Kate.'

Then, on the last day of the trip we were all shopping in a big mall and I looked up and said, 'Gidday Mary, hi Philly!' My team were speechless as I smugly introduced them all to one of my oldest friend's mother and her friend, who were stopping off on trip back from the Uk.

Guess who was little Miss Gloaty for the rest of that trip?

Another from the coincidence archive was when I was in Tokyo I was working with an Australian guy who when he met me said, 'I'd never really known any New Zealanders until last year when I was working in Breckenridge and I got to know a New Zealander really well....oh shit what was his name?'

Blank stare from me.

'Shit, what was his name?' (Is what he thought he said, what actually came out of his mouth was was 'Sheet, what was hees nayme?')

Another blank stare. ( I didn't think it was necessary to point out that -at that time- there were practically four million people living in New Zealand, so trying to guess would have been possibly just a little bit silly.)

'Shit. His father organised the Commonwealth Games.'

'Mike SonoffatherwhoorganisedtheCommonwealth Games,he's a friend of mine - I went to varsity with him.'

'Bloody hell, your country is small.'

When we considered that a New Zealander and an Australian discovered, when they were working in Tokyo, that they had a mutual friend who he had met in Colorado, we thought that was reasonably uncanny.

I'm on a roll now.

When my brother Sunshine and Mrs Sunshine were in Africa, they were hitching from Harare to Victoria and got a ride on the back of a ute. When they pulled into a service station they guy noticed Mrs Sunshine's NZ flag on her pack.

'You guys from New Zealand ? You don't happen to know a bird called Nicki W?'

'Umm, yes' said Mrs Sunshine, 'I used to flat with her.'

'Riiiight, I think you better come home with me.'

Nicki W had been staying with his neighbour for about three months.

This is Africa, people. It's a big place.

One more.

Years ago my sister won a national competition and went to the States, where she was staying along with about forty others from about twenty different countries. (Almost sounds like she was in a beauty competition, doesn't it?') She was in Texas where she was billeted along with a woman from Italy. They were looking at the photo albums of their hosts, from a trip they had made to Italy. And Big Sister's Italian friend found a photo of herself in there.

UPDATING! MY BIG SISTER INFORMS ME THAT BEFORE THEY FOUND A PICTURE OF ITALIAN LAY-DEE IN THE ALBUM, SHE SPOTTED A PHOTO OF MY GRANDPARENTS' HOUSE (you have to scroll down to the photo once you get there) IN SAID PHOTO ALBUM. TOO SPOOKY.

As you do.

Enough from me, I am now opening the floor, anyone else had weird coincidences? Or is it just that my family are never destined to win the lottery, but bump into random people we know in really obscure places all over the world?

Just when I thought my life was a little busy...

...I talked to my friend the-mother-of-four-boys-aged-seven-to-two.

In the weekend she and her husband had a sleep over for the seven year old.

All fifteen members of his rugby team.

Compared to her, my life is a sweet relaxing walk in the park.

Age appropriate footwear.

I went to visit the Family-of-four-boys-six-and-under last night.

I have to say there is something quite glorious when a minature drunk (20 month old) comes running up to you wearing a delighted grin, pyjamas...................and ski boots.

'Oh they're great', says mother-of, 'they slow him down.'