A kind of madness has taken over our house.

People are forgetting to eat, sleep and even breathe.

We are caught up in a new craze. Well, a new craze for us. It's actually been around since the 70's, but as per usual, we are always a "season" or two behind everybody else.

It's all part of our Australia Day celebrations. We are getting into it this year, being all patriotic and "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie".

The children and I began our Australian History curriculum on Thursday, looking into the lives of Aboriginals. Harri especially found it all fascinating, wanting to know so much more about their hunting and eating habits.

A few of their traditions brought about great discussions, with Ellie (already a bit of a feminist) up in arms about the practice of women being banned from the men's ceremonial gatherings. I revealed to her somewhat hesitantly, that women were under the threat of death should they even so much as look like they had been listening in.

"That's not fair Mummy. Women have just as much good stuff to say as men", she howled.

I calmed her with the thought that the men were probably just talking about the best fishing spots or whining about their dinner the night before being cold, and that the women were back at camp making lovely bead necklaces etc, and she seemed to get over it.

We then made a "Bull Roarer" out of an old ruler and took it out in the back garden to try out. It was amazingly loud and sent the dog absolutely mental. We also had a few goes with a boomerang, but that thing just would not come back!

On to some traditional dot and x-ray painting which somehow ended up in the kids in undies, covered with spots (these things do get out of hand sometimes), and we felt "immersed in our rich history", just as the curriculum promised.

So the next step (quite obviously) was to get out our Australian version of Monopoly that we bought ourselves for Christmas. We set it up on Saturday after lunch, and the game has not yet stopped. Even Nev on his way out the door to work this morning, stopped long enough for just one more roll of the dice.

Talk about a house divided! No one is showing anybody else any mercy whatsoever. Land has been bought just so somebody else can't have it, and so help you if you don't have enough money to pay the rent!

Ruthless and soooo hilarious!

At one point, when Ellie had just bought The Sunshine Coast for $2.6 million, Harri said with a really smug look on his face, "I am never, ever, ever going to let you have Brisbane airport (which was the other piece of land Ellie wanted). You've just got Australia Zoo and Bindi and you can't have everything,"

And it wasn't just the kids being greedy. Nev refused to let me buy Barossa Valley - wouldn't swap it for anything! And all because I wanted to put a hotel on it and charge people $3.5 million every time they landed on it.

Honestly, I thought marriage was sacred and you shared everything. Obviously not when it comes to Monopoly.......