Good Friday? It's been a GREAT Friday!

As the black orpington came towards him, the Miniature Genius quavered with studied delight. Not having seen a chicken before, this was quite something. There were fraggle chickens, and white chickens, and bantam chickens, and ducks, and golden cockerels ... so many chickens! In one only place!

He started bokking quietly. Bok! Bok! Ba-gok!

The Miniature Genius does a pretty good chicken impression, I have to say. He can also do Rawr, for the tiger and the lion we saw yesterday at the Melbourne Zoo, and he can say Giraffe, but as they don't make any noise he can't do an impression.

But my goodness, how quickly he's learning new words at the moment. He's on the cusp of turning two, but his vocabulary is extensive. I know three-year-olds who can only say "bacon", and only under intense pressure. This one, though, will repeat just about anything you say. Except my name of course, which has four syllables and is an understandable mouthful.

That's part of the reason we call him the Miniature Genius, though he's also such a serious and considered child that I'm thinking of changing it to the Sober Judge.

Anyway, the visit to the Collingwood Children's Farm was a rip-roaring success, and was probably pipped only by the meerkats at the Zoo yesterday. It's been quite a busy weekend.

The Sister Of My Heart and I have celebrated this rare opportunity to spend so much continuous time with each. Each afternoon at 430, we've toasted the event with a champagne cocktail while the Sober Judge sleeps. Delightful!

Take one champagne flute. Add two centimetres of Chambord, beautiful black raspberry liquer. Pour champagne to the top. Sit back and enjoy.

It's a perfect recipe.

While I'm loving them both being here, the pussins in the house are not quite sure. Fatpuss disappeared under the bed at the first sound of the Sober Judge's dulcet tones, and we think he may have built a fortress under there. The positive side effect is that he's not eating while he's under the bed, so his diet is going quite well at present. I think Fatpuss was scarred by a small child a couple of years ago, when a two-year-old called Gideon spent three hours running up and down the corridor squealing at the Fatpuss. He's never quite recovered.

Grimth is slightly unsure about this small and unpredictable creature now roaming the house. He slinks up curiously, and then turns tail and runs at the slightest movement.

Podae though? He's all smiles and waggy tail, and thank goodness for that. Because without at least one cat to pat, the Sober Judge would be quite upset!

I choo-choo-choose the chocolate egg train

In Sydney yesterday, I finally realised that Easter is just around the corner.

And check out this gold Lindt bunny I saw yesterday near the office - I'm lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective ) to be located quite nearby a Lindt chocolate cafe, and this guy was flanked by lots of people handing out lovely little Lindt eggs, of which I ate far too many.

And see how big he is? That is a real live person in the background on the right. That's how big he is. He's a whopper. A big, gold, chocolatey whopper. Actually I think he's inflated with air, not whipped chocolate mousse, but we can dream, can't we?

There are a couple of reasons I love Easter, I think.

I'm not religious though, and I don't especially love chocolate above all things in the way that many women do (and My One True Love too, he eats more chocolate than any woman I've ever known).

But first - and foremost, I think - my birthday falls in April, and so as a child Easter always meant my birthday was just around the corner. And that was definitely something to be excited about. Birthdays! They're the only day that truly belongs to you. Even if the Easter holidays did often mean there was no one around to come to a party, so I hardly ever had a party on my birthday.

And secondly, Easter did mean chocolate as a child, and there was not a lot of chocolate or even non-specific sweet activity in my household when I was growing up.

This was undoubtedly a good thing, as I'm sure that if I'd been let loose on sweet things I'd have, shall we say, indulged my sweet tooth perhaps more than was healthy for me. But it did also have the short-term effect that whenever I had pocket money I would try to spend it on sweets, and I'm sure I developed a very unhealthy obsession with sugar for a while there until I learnt how to self-regulate.

But what I loved THE MOST about Easter was the egg train. Do you remember the egg train?

It was a cardboard train, just bought from the local supermarket I'm sure, that had individually foil-wrapped eggs in each passenger seat. And every egg was a bright colour, and we all know how much I adore bright colours. I know when Trinny and Susannah were out last week they deplored the lack of colour in Australian wardrobes, and I also know that if they'd had the pleasure to meet me, they could never have accused me of that crime.

I loved the egg train. I looked forward to it every year. I would measure out the eggs by day - slowly unwrapping the foil and smoothing it out until every last wrinkle in the rectangle was ironed out. And the way the foil smelt of chocolate! Coloured chocolate foil, that's what I'm talking about. The chocolate was important, but certainly, it was secondary too, to the glorious foil.

I loved the train for years, until finally it was surpassed by a Red Tulip egg I received when I was .... well, I must have been younger than eleven. That's how old I was when the Sister Of My Heart moved to Sydney, and I know that I used the Red Tulip packaging as a money box to save my Show money into, and that I took it with me when we went to the Show together the year that I was given it. So perhaps we were even in primary school.

I loved the yearly Show, with its showbags and animals and carnival rides, and the ghost train, and that Show (the one with the Red Tulip package as pseudo moneybox) was where the Sister Of My Heart introduced me to the phrase "shout", as in "I'll shout you a ride", which she duly did.

But the Show is another post entirely, let me not get carried away down the sideshow alleys of my memory.

This post is about coloured chocolate foil, and the fact that I'm now trying to find a cardboard train for my godson the Miniature Genius, who's coming to visit me in the arms of his mother, the Sister of My Heart, for the entire Easter break. Five whole unadulterated days of Easter holiday with them both - I can't wait!

So I must, must find the train for him. I want the train. I need the train for him. I choo-choo-choose it, to misquote the Simpsons. The train is an essential part of what Easter is all about. Where o where can I find a chocolate train??!!

A long and lovely weekend

Despite having lived in Melbourne off and on for ... (counts on fingers) nearly eight years, I still can't get the hang of having the Labour Day long weekend in March. In New South Wales, where I grew up, we have Labour Day in October.

So it always comes as something of a surprise when Labour Day rocks up in March and I find myself a bit flat-footed as I scramble for things to do.

This time around, I flew to Sydney for Mountaingirl's housewarming - her place is amazing, this woman has lived here for about 10 weeks now and it already looks like a house out of a magazine. Gah. The skill! The dedication! I've lived in our place with My One True Love for nearly three years and we are still unpacking boxes.

Mountaingirl has a real knack for making a house a home. Before I give away too many details I'm going to stop myself, as I plan to do a special post on Friday in honour of her talent, so be sure to check back then ... let me assure you, you really want to see the book nook.

The other highlight of the trip was catching up with the Sister Of My Heart, and her offspring, (and my godson) the Miniature Genius. He's a very serious and sober child most of the time, but this is a kid who isn't two yet, but who can count to ten, read his name - and the word Bunnings - and pick letters out of the alphabet. He's a smart cookie.

My primary job as godmother is to work on his vocabulary. This weekend we learnt travel-related words - plane (on a plane, off a plane, plane in sky), airport (go airport, home) - oh, and peekaboo, which he pronounces "keeky-boo". It's adorably cute.

On returning to Melbourne less than 24 hours later, I fell victim to some kind of fever on the way back from the airport (off-a-plane), and instead of driving myself home, accidentally drove myself to my favourite plant nursery and spent a vast amount of money on assorted plants, compost and soil instead. Ooopsadaisy.

It's because I've been looking at the bed in the back garden, the one along the fence, for some time now. It's got three silver birches in it, but it's too narrow to do any real layering underneath, and I've been stumped for what to do. And of course the thing about being stumped is that it puts me into paralysis, and I never do anything as a consequence, except gaze in despair at the bed hoping for some magical wand to make it a garden instead of a frustration.

I think my subsconscious brain took over and directed me to the nursery, where instead of wandering about aimlessly as I usually do, I sought out a giant pile of drought-tolerant plants with the determined aim to just plant the damn things in the damn bed and fill up the damn spaces I hate so much.

FIVE BACKBREAKING HOURS LATER, I stood back and took in the view from the verandah. Not a space to be seen. Instead, masses of dark-leaved purple sedum nestled in amongst violet heliotrope bushes and red verbena ground cover. Indigo salvias butting up against unnamed bushes (no label on the pot) crowned with spires of blue flowers. A couple of ballerina roses, not true roses at all, their long red flower spikes topped with dainty pink butterflies. Snowgrass planted along the front of the bed, it'll mass up and create a kind of edging effect. And here and there, a dwarf goblin daisy that will flower in red and orange.

Ahhhh. Much better.

And then today of course I sewed madly, as I have a market each weekend for the next three weekends. All thoughts of the garden forgotten. Photos yet to come.....