When I left you last week, the family was about to undergo a scientific experiment to see if a day in the city could alleviate the effects of cabin fever brought on by the conflicting forces of sustained rain and young children home on school holidays.

This was to take place, as aptness would have it, at the Sciencentre in Brisbane.

We had found a park and I had keyed the important details of the parking space into the data storage unit – AKA, our eight-year-old son Hank.

He is much better than me at remembering things like this because his brain is not yet full.

For me, in order to remember something new I have to forget something so it has room.

My brain, which thankfully is much smarter than me, has worked out that forgetting where the station wagon is parked is an acceptable inconvenience compared to, say, my wedding anniversary (September 24); or that if Hank eats seafood his mouth gets itchy and he can’t breathe properly (bad); or the more notorious stunts of Evel Knievel, may God rest his soul (occasionally useful for nostalgic newspaper columns).

Things such as carpark space M3 (orange) simply don’t stick, so having successfully delegated that responsibility, we went inside, where we made all kinds of fascinating observations, some of which are outlined below.

1. Whenever children are waiting in a queue like the one to enter the Sciencentre – due to a combination of factors such as Just Juice, metabolism, and kids’ finely honed let’s-never-let-our-parents-relax capabilities – one will always need to go to the toilet NOW.

If you have more than one child, like Trace and I do, the second one will tell you that they don’t need to go. They will hold off on telling you this point until you eventually get back from the bathroom expedition with the first one to rejoin the rest of the family in line and they sense that relaxation levels might again be heading upwards.

2. I have a Body Mass Index of 22, which puts me somewhere on a certain graph with all the other people who have Body Mass Indexes but I can’t tell you where because when I was waiting in the queue to check my results, my daughter decided she needed to go to the toilet again.

3. Somebody should tell the Yankees about the 14-year-old kid in the Korn T-shirt who threw the ball way-way-way faster than me at the exhibit which tests how easily 41-year-old dads can dislocate their shoulders while trying to impress their children.

Seriously though – and to pinch a term from what I consider to be the authoritative voice for major league baseball, the movie Bull Durham – the kid had some “heat”.

I’m not just saying that he should go pro as a way of getting my own lame effort into perspective, I’m saying it because I really believe professional sports needs more characters, like a kid who could easily throw 100kph plus while readjusting the controls on his iPod and having his giggling mates attempt to dack him in front of some girls.

“Wow Dad, that boy really smashed you,’’ my son observed in his special, sympathetic manner as we sat on a bench watching a moving display of a skeleton riding a bicycle which only served to reinforce how well my body didn’t work any more.

“Thanks mate,” I replied. Then, to make myself feel better, I sent him over to the section where you could monitor how your smell receptors worked and told him to take a huge whiff of the beaker which I knew contained essence of dog poo.

4. Our girl Clementine, who is five, made an important discovery in her quest to find out what was at the centre of the Earth.

She disassembled the large 3D rubber model, taking away the outer crust, exposing the mantle, the inner liquid core and so on until she eventually arrived at a cross-section of the solid inner core which was represented by a cricket-ball-sized rubber sphere with two circular indentations visible.

“There you go Clem, now you know what’s at the middle of the Earth,’’ I said, sounding so uncomfortably like my old science teacher that I needed to check whether any pens had leaked into my top pocket or if I had missed several belt loops on my trousers while dressing.

“Yes Dad … a piggy’s nose,’’ she replied joyfully.

In conclusion, it was a great day. Hank knew exactly where the car was parked, so that was an important result.

On the way home we pondered many of life’s big questions – like whether man would ever journey to the piggy’s nose.