What do you do when you’re on a hot date sans baby with only two hours to fill? Visit the largest home furnishings store in the southern hemisphere of course! Well… actually, we started out the night with the best of intentions. With only a few hours to fill, a movie was out of the question so we dropped by our favourite sushi-restaurant-that-shall-not-be-named and ordered up. I think I may have gone off sushi. I am not sure how or why this has happened but it really didn’t go down too well at all. So that puzzled me and was slightly disappointing plus we were massively tired and grumpy and at one point I announced that this was the worse date ever. Perhaps I was exaggerating just a little, especially when the sushi-restaurant-that-shall-not-be-named chef sent us over a couple of free icecreams and things started looking a little brighter.

So then we were at a loss as to what to do next. We headed on down Victoria Street and voilà! IKEA’s new super store presented itself as the perfect Hot Date spot. It was 8.30 so even though the store has been only open a week or so and from all reports is a crazy, crazy place to visit and should be avoided if one has an aversion to crowds I figured that only a very few people would really want to spend their Saturday night killing time at IKEA half an hour before closing. And we have come to the conclusion that IKEA at 8.30 on a Saturday night is the perfect place to go on a date. Not only can you oooh and ahhh at amazing amounts of Scandinavian cheap design, but there are hundreds of little mini apartments / rooms done up to look as though someone really lives in them and at 8.30pm they look very lived in. It’s as though you get to walk through all these little houses and peer into someone else’s life. Most of the beds looked as though someone had just got out of them sporting huge hang-overs, rugs were rumpled and tripped over and most of the bathrooms even looked as though some one had just used them – greasy finger marks on mirrors and rubbish in the display rubbish bins.

There was a kind of surreal atmosphere created by over tired kids, frazzled parents, inner-city hipsters and eager-to-get-out-of-there IKEA store people, all following the arrows on the floor that allow for no short cuts. With a guy announcing periodically over the loud speaker that the store would be closing in “20 minutes…” 15, 10 and 5, there was a slight sense of panic to get through all the different sections. A sales assistant told me that the record for getting from the start of the store to the end is 7 minutes. You would have to be truly belting through the place at a rate of knots to do it 7 minutes. The most amazing thing about IKEA is the pure hugeness of the store. The smell of pine gets a bit much, and if you actually wanted to buy something the queues at the cash registers were phenomenal but it was definitely an experience. In fact, I would go as far as to say that IKEA Richmond would be a great place to go after dinner (and a few ales) on a first date. You can wander aimlessly through the store and there are plenty of opportunities to make gags, gawp at other people and suss out what kind of person your date really is. Does he go for the slightly bizarre ILEN tv bench? Perhaps he goes crazy in the pots and pans section (a good sign for sure) or maybe he keeps smoothing down quilt covers and tugging at stray threads hanging from sofas, all the while tsk-ing over little kids who are experiencing IKEA in their own way.

Following our trip to homewares heaven, we dashed over to Borders to kill the last half hour and browsed the magazine section along with the multitudes of others who were perched on any surface possible flicking through their chosen mags. I purchased the Martha Stewart trifecta (1, 2, 3 – I really need to do something about this Martha Stewart fixation. It’s getting a bit sad and expensive) and we got out of there within the “free half hour” car parking time limit. So our date that could have been the worst date ever turned out to be pretty fun.

And P? I wasn’t scared of those swans on Sunday. I was wary. And rightly so. They were big, mean and hungry (but they did have very pretty wing feathers).

There is nothing like dancing pretend ballet steps around the kitchen in front of my giggling, chubby, gurgling, adoring audience of one. I run out of things to do to entertain Amelia J. She can’t do too much yet and there are only so many stories I can read her, walks I can take her on, baths to give her or toys to waggle enticingly in front of her exploring finger tips. So ballet moves it is. I can swoop and spin to whatever bit of classical stuff they are playing on Radio National and Amelia J will watch me totally enchanted with the occasional excited stretch of her body, waggle of her arms and a wide gummy smile. She has no idea that I am really exceedingly uncoordinated and clumsy as I plié and scoop mashed sweet potato into a baby bowl. She would clap her hands together if she could.

Yes, that’s right, sweet potato! So far I have pureed and served apple, pear, sweet potato and avocado. She screwed up her face in disgust and then firmly shoved her thumb in her mouth when I tried the avocado (and green slimy muck covered everything) but the others have been relatively successful.

In other Amelia J news, I have had to take the wee gal to a baby chiropractor. After returning from our beach holiday the week before last, we discovered that she was holding her head on a jaunty yet slightly distressing angle. While she looked up at us with a kind of appealing puppy dog head tilt I began to worry when it wasn’t getting any better after day four. So the baby chiropractor stretched her out on the baby massage table (so cute!) and checked her out to try and work out where the problem stemmed from. It seems it could have been because she slept on a funny angle in her baby capsule on the way home in the car and after one swift finger stab (so scary!) into the right side of her neck he said we should see some improvement over a few days. I am not so sure about chiropractors – the one-click-fix doesn’t seem possible to me. I more inclined to believe that slow rehabilitative exercises might help to fix such a problem, but sure enough she seems to be looking at us a little more straight on now. As a by-product of this neck problem, I developed a mild case of mastitis due to AJ not being able to hold her head comfortably on one side to feed. Amelia turns 6 months next Thursday and I would have thought I might have had all the breast feeding problems sorted by now.

And to top off a bonzer week, Amelia has started waking twice a night again… last night it was 12.30 and then again at three thirty for an hour’s worth of ear piercing screams. Luckily she is one cute kid or we’d be very grumpy by now.

Today is my birthday. 31. My! How is it that I got to be so young? Or something. I was woken pre-dawn by Big-P rustling like crazy in the closet by the bed. My immediate reaction was to spring up and say “SHHH! You’ll wake Amelia before I have had a chance to have my coffee!” but upon realising that it was my birthday and that he was getting my beautiful present down from it’s hiding place I decided that I had better lose the cranky mum act. I also received enough chocolate truffles to build a small chocolate truffle house if I wanted to and the great creator/thor/mother nature has provided me with an icy-cold-autumnal-downpours kind of day as the perfect birthday back-drop.

To answer the age-old birthday question “are you doing anything special today?” the answer is I am making special birthday baby food, having a special birthday nap, checking through oodles of special birthday spam and tonight eating special birthday pizza while watching a special birthday video.

I watched too much news yesterday and went to bed with a heavy heart. I will not make that mistake again today – just the 7pm ABC news and nothing more. It is my birthday after all.