"Professor Egg and the Amazing New Muesli Maker"

Egg has decided that he's sick of Bali and doesn't want to go to school anymore.  We suspect that this might have something to do with his recent addiction to the Cartoon Network and being yanked away from an especially engrossing episode of Tom & Jerry this morning.  

This upsets the husband and I, not only for the long term implications of his scholastic career, but because we weekly have to fork out £100/week for the privilege of sending the monsters somewhere they apparently aren't that keen to go.

(For that amount of money the husband and I could procure approximately one hundred lattes...or put another way, seventy homemade gelato's).

Egg might just be going through a difficult stage at the moment.  His current favourite movie is "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs' and he utterly idolises the main character, an inventor by the name of 'Flint Lockwood'.  He has taken to begging us daily for a white lab coat and the husband and I are already imagining how we're going to have to get him fitted up in India for one for Christmas.  In the meantime however, Egg is quite happy using the husbands big white t-shirt as a temporary replacement, and as such, has been spending a lot of time in the artists studio here, pretending it's his lab.

His first invention is to be "A Muesli Maker".  He has drawn out the invention and included detailed point by point instructions for constructing it.  I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified that my son is so obsessed with this overpriced, imported contraband $7 a packet granola cereal as to be attempting to set up his own supply.  Bless.

Things reached crisis point the other day when Kadek the Pembantu (nanny) came running upstairs to where I was trying to work on the computer, holding aloft the last remaining bit of cereal and being chased by Egg who was wielding a heavy wooden stick and trying to knock it from her grasp.  

It was all a bit frighteningly 'Children of the Corn' and I know for a fact that poor Kadek does not get paid enough to have to put up with such monstrous behavior.  Even Dumpie was getting in on the action, pulling up the rear with his light sabre and chanting 'moosli....moosli....moosli!'

Personally I think the monsters are going to have one huge reality check when they're eventually back in London, no longer have a Pembantu to order around, and have to become reacquainted with the British state school system.  

Somehow I think they'll recall fondly their school trips to 'Bali Fun World' and having science lessons that consisted of chasing butterflies round an ethereally pretty garden.  

And as for school dinners?  With the first hefty slap of mushy peas proffered up on plastic plate, I suspect a inward tear or two will be shed when remembering the 'prepared fresh daily' Indonesian delights that were to be had for a mere dollar a day in the outdoor bamboo canteen...