Mother's day lions

Lara: Happy muvvers day mummy
Me: Thanks Lara!
Lara: Did you get a lion?
Me: I did!
Lara: Can I see it?

The big Re-tox

Doing a detox in January is SO 90s. I even managed to rope a couple of people into joining me. We started on Monday and by Wednesday we were all SO over it!

On Wednesday evening I wrote on the fridge with those magnetic letters

'Detox be damned'

and I woke up on Thursday morning to

'Retox cmaaaaaan!'

So on Thursday we ate meat and chocolate and drank copious amounts of beer and wine. Just to make up for lost time.

Have you noticed I've started talking like a teenager? I'm doing a teacher training course this year and the past two weeks I've been following around secondary school students in their classes. Those poor kids, man. Can you remember it? School is sooooo boring. From one lesson to the next, hard chairs, watching the clock until the next lesson. It's good to remember this. There must be another solution, surely? I sat in some Maths classes and all of it went COMpletely over my head! I must have studied Algebra but I remember NOTHING - was completely outdone by a bunch of 13 year olds!

Aaanyway, so this teacher training course will either mean you'll see even less of me than you have been these days or much more as I should be writing assignemts etc. Procrastination is a strength of mine.

On that note. Better dash.

Oh what's the point!

This seems to be the first time in months that I’ve actually had a moment to sit still and breathe. Sit still without having furiously pedaling the current of Things To Be Done. Without children clattering at my feet, tax returns needing to be done (still not done actually. I figure I’m already 6 months late, what difference does it make now. It does I know but….)

I can quickly, quietly and calmly

pause.

For all of 12 minutes.

I am heading to the wide plains of the Serengeti in an hour. Just for the weekend. My man has some work to do up there and we’ve managed to tag along for the ride. Can’t wait.

I’m starting school again in Jan. A postgrad degree to become a teacher. Gulp.

Oh look, that was less than 12 minutes. Child is clamouring again, can’t focus.

More soon! (If you believe that then…well…I dunno)

Floods and 9 month olds

A few years ago, just before we moved from Zambia, we had floods at home. I wrote about it here. My family lives on an ox-bow lagoon that floods every rainy season. And this particular year the water kept rising. And rising.

And rising.

And as the water started lapping at the front step we were amazed but thought it couldn’t possibly rise any further. But it did. It licked the front step and then seemed to think ’what the heck’ and came into the house, without so much as a ‘hodi, may I come in?’ And so we moved any mats and carpets we had and books low on the bookshelves up onto the coffee tables and thought ‘there, it won’t get any higher than that.

But it did.

 

It went from just covering our toes to ankle deep to mid calf deep. Once it started to reach the top of the coffee tables we moved everything up to the next level. Up onto the dining table went the books and everything else.

And still the water rose. Because of the crocodiles we’d have to boat from one house to the next to move everything up to the next level.

 

And I’m reminded about this again now that my son has started to crawl. When he was just a blob we could plonk him on the floor with a few toys and we’d all be happy.

But now.

Up to the coffee table go those glass lanterns. Up the fridge go the magnetic letters.

This worked for a few days.

And now he pulls himself up to standing on the coffee table. Up up up goes everything.

My Non-existent Off Button

The thing about me is this. Once I start doing something, once I get something between my teeth I cannot stop. This is not necessarily a good thing.

If there is chocolate in the house I cannot rest until it has all been eaten up. Please secretly buy a bottle of nutella and hide it from me, I asked Mark the other day.

If I start a book I have to know that I have nothing else happening in my life at the time that can’t be neglected (my poor husband. My poor children…)

It was like that with my blog for a while. I wrote and wrote and wrote. As you can see the novelty wore off.

So I’ve had the first two series of Downton Abby that I borrowed from a friend waiting on my shelf. Waiting. Because I’ve been rehearsing and busy and not trusting myself with it. And now rehearsals are winding up, I’ve got a bit more free time. So the other day I thought “ah, just one episode” And now I cannot. Stop.

Random things - mostly kid related

Okay so I've been stalling at this blogging thing. I have so many little snippets of things I could write flitting about in my brain, but when I sit down and try to package them into clever witty little posts they just blow away like dry dandelions on a windy day (do you know how many attempts that was to spell dandelion? Oh dear!)

So I won't try and be witty and clever. I'll just write. Alright?

Sorting through the vaaast number of my kids' clothes the other day, I realised that I have not bought a single stitch of clothing for my second child. Or my first for that matter. Well, for Lara I may have bought about 4 or 5 items in her whole life. But Tom? Not even one! But look how many clothes they have!

Top shelf Tom, bottom shelf Lara - see how many blue things Tom has and how many pink things Lara has. It's a funny old world! And yes, the clothes are two deep, in case you can't see from there.

This is not to say I'm hugely popular or that my friends are ridiculously generous (actually they are!) just that there is a great hand-me-down system happening in this town. Maybe its the same everywhere in the world, but I love that almost all these clothes have gone through at least 3 different children, sometimes more. Every often someone will come up and say "oh, that used to be my son's t-shirt!" And usually that person is not the one who gave me the t-shirt. For example the other day Lara was wearing a pair of shoes that were given to me by Kim who got them from Joe who got them from a friend in the UK who got them from someone else. And I will pass them on to Mink. I love that! Another friend has a little crib that she got as a hand me down and has passed it on and every baby that has slept in it has had their name written on it - there were at least 60 names! Actually I can't remember how many names but I remember being staggered at the number!

So that's baby clothes, a terribly interesting topic.

And here is some art work by my extremely talented and awesome child, just gone 3. Or maybe I'm just biased, I dunno.

 

The top one is a hedgehog, the next one is me, and the bottom one is a nervous man. Why is he nervous? Because he just trod in the mud.  

And Invisible Theatre? Some of you have asked. Indeed. We're working on a nationwide children's rights campaign and I have 7 teams of actors - 3 per team - travelling on the major bus routes of the country. They pretend to be normal passengers and they have a loose script tat they follow. A discussion/argument about children's rights which drag all the other passengers into the debate. It's been very fiery and interesting and effective and fun. More on that soon.

So. There. That's it for now. Oh oh, haven't done the picture window for an age. Let me do that now.

Look how beeg that tree has got!

Sun and fog

I feel that, if I squint my eyes and stare really hard, I can see light through the fog of double motherhood. The sun has come out and is slowly burning off the bleary blurryness. My daughter just turned three and my son 6 months. I have started doing a bit of exercise (a flurry of it actually. The first week excitement that's bound to wear off by Tuesday next week. My valiant declaration of 'I'll be in my pre-pregnancy clothes by the end of September' may well turn from shouting it out loud to sheepishly mumbling it from the corner of my mouth).

And although my boy still refuses to sleep much in the day at least he'll now happily go to other people without screaming the house down like the Big Bad Wolf. He has three teeth, no hair, he rarely cries (but when he does oooooh boy!) and he is an all round awesomely cute little heart melter. And his big sister is just as besotted as I am which I am truly grateful for.

I've been trying to keep operating normally but now I see that I have about 20 unfinished blog posts in my drafts folder, and most of the time I've been walking around with one hairy and one shaved leg. If I'm honest with myself I guess I've been struggling a bit, not majorly, but enough to keep me in a semi-zombie state. And I am lucky. I have help. And a supportive husband. And I haven't started work yet. I do not know how people manage without help, having to work etc. Maybe they don't, I dunno.

I was supposed to start rehearsal on a new play (4 of them actually!) on Monday but we've been a bit delayed. I'm hoping early August. While I saw away having babies the actors have been travelling around the country on all the major bus routes performing Invisible Theatre (did I tell you this already?) Its been going really well, so much so that we've been asked to continue. And add another element. I'm really excited about this.

And the Zambian actors are performing in Korea as we speak! Veryvery exciting. Oh to be a fly on the wall!

Bugger, gotta dash.......