3 Hours, 7 Kids and 1 Lost Child Announcement

Imagine my terror when I recently arrived at the zoo at the height of school holidays and discovered the stroller wasn’t in the car.

“Oh, come on!” I can hear the usual people pipe up, though admittedly they’ve been pretty quiet in my head recently. “Your youngest child is almost three and more than capable of walking by himself.”

“But what about the lunches, snacks, drinkypots, jumpers, nappy stuff, change of clothes and (inevitably) Mr Justice’s backpack containing a cubic metre of McRubbish and The Big Book Of Knowledge, aptly named because it weighs more than a four-year-old wearing a diving belt?” is my quick(ish) retort to such people. “Are they able to walk by themselves??”

Honestly, I don’t know how people go anywhere without a stroller. They must either have trained their children to trek for days through the jungle carrying their own body-weight in provisions, or they just buy their food and drinks while out at the kind of prices that would make employing a full-time Porter a more economical option.

Luckily I was meeting my more-prepared friend Mistress M, who did bring her stroller but who also turned out to be slightly less prepared than I because she’d left her wallet at home, with her zoo membership card in it.

You know how they say “getting there is half the fun”? Sometimes it also takes half the energy. By the time Mistress M had blagged her way past the Zoo Door Bitches armed only with a Medicare letter and her smile, we’d sorted out parking tickets and we’d finally started the negotiations of Which Animal To See First, I felt a wave of fatigue and was ready to go home. But with a grand total of seven children under our care (six of whom were under 5 years and two of whom were Not Of Our Loins), we were not going to get out of it so easily.

Still, I managed to rise to the occasion. Normally I have this “sense” of three kids about me. I don’t have to count, I just know when there are three and when there are not three. After an hour or so of constantly counting seven heads as we wandered from cage to cage, I started to get a sense of seven, too. Such is my skill.

But then Mistress M and I made a fatal mistake: we tried to have an actual conversation. In the time that it took to say “Oh, you used to watch Survivor, too!”, we managed to lose a child. And of course it had to be one of the children that wasn’t ours. I put the remaining six children in lock down mode (using an artful distribution of sugary snacks and a rousing sing-a-long), while Mistress M ran around the zoo desperately shouting “Bella! Bella!” (for of course, it was she – the child known as Cyclone Bella).

Thanks to a Lost Child Announcement and a network of zoo attendants armed with walky-talkies and taser guns, she was returned to us after ten long minutes. And, of course, it was then and only then that I really fell apart and clutched at Bella and Mistress M like a drowning sailor.

When I asked Cyclone Bella where she’d been, she said “Oh, I was just sitting down.” Which I kind of understood, except if I were to have gone missing at that very moment, it would be more a case of “Oh, I was just sitting down and alternating between breathing into a paper bag and swigging from a bumper-sized flagon of wine.”

Anyway, the long and the short of it is this: next school holidays, I’m definitely employing a Porter. He can carry the snacks (etc), The Big Book of Knowledge, the paper bag and the wine. And Cyclone Bella. And probably me.

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