Category: the parenting bunny

A few years on

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How time flies when you’re having fun. Or when you’re just getting older, since time is relative and every second makes up a smaller proportion of your lifespan. Which is why you have to get lucky to hit that fly on your Kalahari Kreef. To him, that hand is like watching an episode of Time Warp. There was a BBC documentary on it, so it must be true.

But I digress. Often.

It was Argus day today – that being the day of the biggest timed cycle race in the world – and we went to watch for as long as the kids were interested.
I took this photo (which actually I really like) of the boy watching the bikes going by:

and it wasn’t until I got home and began uploading stuff that I found a photo of the same boy in the same place doing the same thing:

The camera has changed, probably the cyclists too. The yellow line still needs repainting. But the (wholly unintentional) similarity between the pictures is striking, no?

The earlier photo was taken three years and three days ago, which would make Alex 10½ months old. Flickr tells me that young Alex was snapped on my 2MP Sony Ericsson W900i, which would go some way to explaining the (iffy) quality.  As would the fact it was taken at 7:49 on a Sunday morning.

More Argus day pics in the March Things flickr set.

I can do science, me

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Being a scientist myself, I was delighted that Alex’s school was running a science week this week. He’s learnt lots, from the water cycle, through to dissolving salt via something or other with yeast. The finale of the week was today’s Mad Scientist Day, where all the kids came dressed as… well… Mad Scientists.
It was a novelty for him, but to be honest, nothing short of a normal day for me.

Alex is now hugely enthusiastic about science, but that’s only because no-one has told him about the long hours and lousy wages yet.

Village population grows

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Damn. While I disappear off 6,137 miles from civilisation, little Mrs Ordinary Life pops her sprog.
Obviously, we knew that this was coming, but we weren’t absolutely sure when.

But just as dawn was breaking, things happened.
And those things were announced to the world just 1 hour and 59 minutes later:

Kaylin Elizabeth born at 5.50 am!

This, of course, is what little children do. They mess with your inner clock. They tug on your internal hour hand. Without the intervention of modern science, you can be assured that babies will be born in the early hours of the morning or during the penalty shootout at the end of a really exciting FA Cup semi-final replay.

It is great training for the months and – dare I say years? (yes, I dare) – years that follow.  At no point in its first 5 years of life does a child wake up, check the clock (and for clock, read presence of daylight) and think “Hmm – maybe it’s still a bit early. I’ll turn over and go back to sleep”.

No. They wander into your room and demand entertainment and food. And if they are too young to wander into your room, they stay where they are and demand entertainment and food. Each night, we line the route between Alex’s room and ours with rusks. Our landing is now an Ouminefield. (Note: that joke only works if you’re South African and you have consumed a bottle of red wine before reading it, sorry).

But no. In he comes and before I know it, Handy Manny and his seven trusty tools are singing their half-English, half-Spanish songs about fixing Mrs Portillo’s stove while the boy spreads crumbs across the bed. So I head to the kitchen in search of coffee and end up crunching a roomful of breakfast biscuits down the stairs. And then people wonder why I’m grumpy in the mornings.

These are the challenges that Mr & Mrs Ordinary Life have to face in the coming years. They are fortunate to have me doing reccies for them 4 and 1½ years ahead. Indeed, the only bad news for them is that I will be telling the truth.

But for the moment, many congratulations to Pammie and her husband.
And welcome Kaylin Elizabeth.

I told you it was going to be a boy.

Struispost

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Season’s Greetings (mid to late summer) from Struisbaai, home of the southern hemisphere’s longest stretch of white sand beach, a bewilderingly large variety of birdlife and – for this extended weekend, at least – family 6000.
I love the Southern Cape – perhaps because the rolling farmland, rugged coastline and friendly residents remind me of the Isle of Man. But whereas there’s plenty of stuff south of the Isle of Man, you don’t get much more south than here without getting very wet (and then very cold). After all, we’re about 10km from Cape Agulhas, site of the most southerly blog post this continent has ever seen.

We’ve rented a fisherman’s cottage for the weekend and it’s perfect for our needs. It’s really just a base for sleeping and braai’ing, within a minute’s walk of the beach and situated directly beneath clear blue skies. But it’s clean, pleasantly cool inside, nicely appointed and actually rather pretty to look at. I’ll post the details on here once we’ve moved on – it would be both awkward and annoying if a host of 6000 miles… readers turned up looking for autographs and locks of hair like when I was away last time. If you were better at stalking, you’d know where I was anyway.

While the beds are comfy and the air is fresh – usually a recipe for prolonged slumbers – Alex was up dangerously early this morning. While a 5am wake-up call isn’t to everyone’s tastes when trying to get some much-needed R&R, it’s par for the course when you have two small kids. After some negotiation and a couple of sausages from last night’s braai, I took both him and the camera down onto the beach for walk and some quick sunrise pics, Joyanne-style.
And look – I can see the attraction in one way – it was nice exercise, the views were pretty spectacular as the sun burst out from behind the morning clouds and turned the turquoise ocean a deep gold and – save for a couple of fishermen – the beach was ours. But on the other hand, I can also see the attraction of a deep bed, a cosy duvet and a warm wife.
So I’ll be honest: the jury is still very much out on the whole sunrise beach trip thing.

It’s now lunchtime and by some miracle, both kids are fast asleep. Later this afternoon, we’re going to take another step towards cementing our relationship with this beautiful area by inspecting a plot of land near here with a view to purchasing it and – at some stage in the future – having our own little fisherman’s cottage by the sea. I guess that what they call “living the dream”.

Posted from my Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

Darling Daughter

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With Mrs 6000 away in Jo’burg, little K-pu decided to literally throw her toys out of the cot at 3:10am this morning. We didn’t get back to sleep.
I’m pretty knackered, as you might imagine, hence this completely inappropriate quota photo of her back in November 2008.

The sort of wholly unjustified behaviour she demonstrated last night is really not typical of her and I wanted to be angry, but one quick cuddle and my annoyance was put firmly on the back burner.

Damn you, Mother Nature.