The one thing no parenting book prepares you for is children's parties.
Family for tea and cake for his first birthday and, "Oh good heavens no party, he'll never even remember" for his second. At this stage we had not been to another child's party.
When he turned three we had. Or should I say I had, my husband would rather saw his arm off with a plastic spoon.
There are degrees of insanity at these parties, but I was in no doubt I had witnessed the full insanity thereof. For his third birthday his two besties came with their construction vehicles; we let them loose in what would become my veggie garden.
The next year I saw it all again. Parties that must take the moms weeks to prepare, the long, low table and little chairs. Each child's place has a beautifully made (I still have them, they're too perfect to throw away) goodie bag with the latest favourite TV show characters perfectly reproduced and stuffed, to my eternal horror, with sugar in equally well-crafted likenesses. And the cakes, good heavens, the cakes ...
Then there're the moms, encouraged to accompany their child who at least provide me with material for my blogs. It's all so perfect until the kids arrive; within five minutes it looks like a crime scene.
So when our son's fourth birthday came around I knew what I didn't want. No Disney theme, no low-slung table, no rot-your-teeth-just-looking-at-it goodie bag and NO MOMS.
The thought of entertaining them at home was also a non-starter so we took to the mountains; that is after all why we moved here. Since we live in one of the oldest gold mining towns in the country the mountains are pocked with old tunnels and excavation shafts.
The invite Specified old clothe,a headlight and no moms.My friends thought I was mad, taking what started out as six kids but ended up closer to 12 into the mountains on our own. I said, "Bye."
I have a commanding voice and before we left a few short, sharp instructions were issued to a group of seated, super excited kids.
Rule 1: The Jack Russell goes first, she will take care of anything untoward on the path or at least notify us thereof.
Rule 2: Any fighting, you get taken home.
Rule 3: We all have legs and we're all going to use them, no 'uppie'.
Rule 4: No pushing and shoving in the shaft, walk don't run and help each other.
Then we crammed into cars and headed for the creek.
Early that morning we'd nipped out to mark a not-insignificant trail to the old shaft with balloons.
Those kids ate up that trail, they ran from balloon to balloon. They shouted, they whooped, they tripped they fell, they shed not a tear. When they got to a steep, rocky part of the trail I knew some may need help and was prepared to offer piggy-backs, but no, if my mates can do it, so can I and up they scrambled, some on all fours.
It was as if they could smell the gold, it was so obviously one of the most exhilarating things they'd ever done that every moment was priceless and because our son knew the trail it was his 'show'.
We had of course also prepared the shaft with gold.
And to their enduring pleasure they found gold and stuffed their 'prospecting' bags so full they couldn't carry it all. On their own they would notice someone who didn't have any and shared unprompted.
They stumbled back into the light for juice and half a cupcake and then went straight back in.
We walked back to the cars with heads filled with magic and gold, tired legs and a party still talked about.
They were incredible, not once did I need to raise my voice or use my super stare; their energy had been allowed to follow unrestrained, their imaginations unencumbered ...
... and we had as much fun as they did.
Friday 9 January 2015
Thursday 8 January 2015
Opting out: Firsts in the Free State
My husband and I had always said that Jo'burg had a lifespan for us. From time to time the city would reach its zenith for us, the traffic, the noise, the fact that you could no longer pop out on a quick errand, it would take you all morning. Then there's the lifestyle; before we got married we threw a tent, two guitars and a couple of jerrycans in the back of an old 1981 Hilux, stuffed 100 US dollars in the cubbyhole and waved goodbye, heading north across the Limpopo.
We craved the bush, mountains, creeks, anything but the drunken neighbours, hooters, sirens and the exhaust fumes I ingested every time I ventured out for a run.
The city of gold was fast turning into a city of plastic, faux, faster, better, bigger, more ... everything we're not ... is there really a need for another mall?
But every time we'd had it with Jozi something came up and we'd push it all aside for the moment. Life doesn't stop happening , it doesn't stop for you to stay, "Oh, there's a gap coming up in our life where we will have the time to comb the countryside looking for a gorgeous house in a gorgeous town."
Then something bigger than life did happen. Suddenly and for the most part unprepared. We'd been trying in vain to start a family and had decided to go the adoption route – specifically the trans-race adoption route as the waiting period is shorter and it made not a jot of difference to us – once your intense screening process is complete you wait for the phone to ring, for a voice on the other side to say there's a baby ... it rang three days after our screening was complete.
We wanted quicker ...
The day we took our son home my husband started house hunting online.
Our little boy was four months old when he came home and we spent the next eight months finding heaven via Marquard.
Heard of it?
It's a very small town in the eastern Free State that is desperately trying to be something that it will just never be. The kind of town where the only cafe's cappuccinos are filter coffee with frothed milk and they're okay with that.
The issue with moving outside the three-, sometimes four-hour ring of ugly that surrounds Jo'burg is that you have to maximize towns and house viewing. All this happens online and via email, you see a few possible likes, you scour the map book and ID towns in the vicinity, then scour the online property sites for anything in those towns, then email some over-zealous agents (are there any other kind?) and set up a 4-town, 24-house weekend.
I learned two things: how to change a soiled nappy on the back seat of a moving car with a child in a supported standing position and that estate agents are, in the main, hard of hearing.
On the Marquard weekend we were breathing deeply in the shade of a large tree in the agent's garden, she was trying to flog us her house. I was probably breathing far deeper than my husband, rolling my shoulders back over and over and occasionally adding a head roll in an attempt to stop myself telling her that a) we specifically said no Randpark Ridge-style face-brick houses b) no old houses with visible steal supports running the length of the room just below the ceiling (banks don't like those) and c) no clearly industrial-type offices complete with lengthy passages and meeting rooms. This last was the straw that had me seething under the acacia. I knew while waiting for the door to be opened I didn't want to go inside. And wait we did, for the caretaker (and a hundred of his closest friends), one of which had just used the amenities after what must have been a rough night, to open up.
I was hot and irritated and then our son crawled, for the first time. He was sitting and then he was crawling.
We were delighted, totally chuffed, as parents are, as though they had anything to do with it, and the estate agent? beside herself.
The following morning, before following her to view two houses in Hobhouse, we told her he had held his bottle on his own for the first time. Bless her, she took it as a sign that we were destined for a life in Marquard.
We do not live there but our boy is a seasoned traveller.
We craved the bush, mountains, creeks, anything but the drunken neighbours, hooters, sirens and the exhaust fumes I ingested every time I ventured out for a run.
The city of gold was fast turning into a city of plastic, faux, faster, better, bigger, more ... everything we're not ... is there really a need for another mall?
But every time we'd had it with Jozi something came up and we'd push it all aside for the moment. Life doesn't stop happening , it doesn't stop for you to stay, "Oh, there's a gap coming up in our life where we will have the time to comb the countryside looking for a gorgeous house in a gorgeous town."
Then something bigger than life did happen. Suddenly and for the most part unprepared. We'd been trying in vain to start a family and had decided to go the adoption route – specifically the trans-race adoption route as the waiting period is shorter and it made not a jot of difference to us – once your intense screening process is complete you wait for the phone to ring, for a voice on the other side to say there's a baby ... it rang three days after our screening was complete.
We wanted quicker ...
The day we took our son home my husband started house hunting online.
Our little boy was four months old when he came home and we spent the next eight months finding heaven via Marquard.
Heard of it?
It's a very small town in the eastern Free State that is desperately trying to be something that it will just never be. The kind of town where the only cafe's cappuccinos are filter coffee with frothed milk and they're okay with that.
The issue with moving outside the three-, sometimes four-hour ring of ugly that surrounds Jo'burg is that you have to maximize towns and house viewing. All this happens online and via email, you see a few possible likes, you scour the map book and ID towns in the vicinity, then scour the online property sites for anything in those towns, then email some over-zealous agents (are there any other kind?) and set up a 4-town, 24-house weekend.
I learned two things: how to change a soiled nappy on the back seat of a moving car with a child in a supported standing position and that estate agents are, in the main, hard of hearing.
On the Marquard weekend we were breathing deeply in the shade of a large tree in the agent's garden, she was trying to flog us her house. I was probably breathing far deeper than my husband, rolling my shoulders back over and over and occasionally adding a head roll in an attempt to stop myself telling her that a) we specifically said no Randpark Ridge-style face-brick houses b) no old houses with visible steal supports running the length of the room just below the ceiling (banks don't like those) and c) no clearly industrial-type offices complete with lengthy passages and meeting rooms. This last was the straw that had me seething under the acacia. I knew while waiting for the door to be opened I didn't want to go inside. And wait we did, for the caretaker (and a hundred of his closest friends), one of which had just used the amenities after what must have been a rough night, to open up.
I was hot and irritated and then our son crawled, for the first time. He was sitting and then he was crawling.
We were delighted, totally chuffed, as parents are, as though they had anything to do with it, and the estate agent? beside herself.
The following morning, before following her to view two houses in Hobhouse, we told her he had held his bottle on his own for the first time. Bless her, she took it as a sign that we were destined for a life in Marquard.
We do not live there but our boy is a seasoned traveller.
Tuesday 6 January 2015
Black Like Me
No it's not time for another Caucasian vs Ethnic hair diatribe, although Black Like Me is to most of us a common hair care brand. No, this runs skin deep and is in the words of Mastercard "priceless".
My husband and I were sitting on the stoep (veranda for my US readers, to whom I am very grateful for their audience) when my daughter was a lot younger, probably nine months or so. She was sitting on the floor playing and my son, a couple of years older was sitting close by with his large box of assorted plastic building blocks.
A word on this box of blocks; he could not live without it, he builds Dr Seuss-style houses with a fervour quite rare in one so young. He can spend hours building the most elaborate pieces of architecture, or a minute, one can never be sure. One of our most feared sounds is the clamorous tipping out of the entire box onto the slate floor at 5.30 in the morning. It elicits an involuntary, lengthy groan from our bed in which we are still stubbornly ensconced, denying the inevitable.
I doubt we were sitting quietly reading that afternoon on the stoep, this is a pastime denied the new parent, we may have been watching our new baby girl and marvelling at the incredible coordination displayed by one so young – smiling contentedly, nodding to each other knowingly – but more probably we were listening to an endless, mind-numbing stream of questions and commentary in a language that takes infinite concentration to understand from our son – answers are demanded so attention must be paid – and trying to stop the Jack Russell licking her in the face.
From nowhere he stops and says, "Hey!"
We look up to find him pointing at his sister's neck in sheer amazement, "Ella's black like me!"
For a moment we're dumbstruck and both venture a tentative, "What?"
"ELLA! SHE'S BLACK LIKE ME!"
He couldn't believe it and there it was right before his innocent two-year-old eyes.
It was so random, so left field, so out of nowhere that we guffawed, then laughed and giggled; much later we were still sniggering. It was his sheer surprise.
Of course we knew that at some point our children would realize our skin colour was not the same as theirs – every older child at his nursery school had and as children do had inquired extensively about this anomaly – but when it happened we weren't prepared even though in our adoption screening we had been extensively prepped.
But this, as with most things to do with our son, was on its head; he had identified with her, rather than comparing with us.
When we'd gathered ourselves my husband asked, "What colour am I?"
He thought a minute then referred to what he was most familiar with, his blocks, rummaged carefully through the box and triumphantly produced a block, holding it on high.
"Red!"
My husband and I were sitting on the stoep (veranda for my US readers, to whom I am very grateful for their audience) when my daughter was a lot younger, probably nine months or so. She was sitting on the floor playing and my son, a couple of years older was sitting close by with his large box of assorted plastic building blocks.
A word on this box of blocks; he could not live without it, he builds Dr Seuss-style houses with a fervour quite rare in one so young. He can spend hours building the most elaborate pieces of architecture, or a minute, one can never be sure. One of our most feared sounds is the clamorous tipping out of the entire box onto the slate floor at 5.30 in the morning. It elicits an involuntary, lengthy groan from our bed in which we are still stubbornly ensconced, denying the inevitable.
I doubt we were sitting quietly reading that afternoon on the stoep, this is a pastime denied the new parent, we may have been watching our new baby girl and marvelling at the incredible coordination displayed by one so young – smiling contentedly, nodding to each other knowingly – but more probably we were listening to an endless, mind-numbing stream of questions and commentary in a language that takes infinite concentration to understand from our son – answers are demanded so attention must be paid – and trying to stop the Jack Russell licking her in the face.
From nowhere he stops and says, "Hey!"
We look up to find him pointing at his sister's neck in sheer amazement, "Ella's black like me!"
For a moment we're dumbstruck and both venture a tentative, "What?"
"ELLA! SHE'S BLACK LIKE ME!"
He couldn't believe it and there it was right before his innocent two-year-old eyes.
It was so random, so left field, so out of nowhere that we guffawed, then laughed and giggled; much later we were still sniggering. It was his sheer surprise.
Of course we knew that at some point our children would realize our skin colour was not the same as theirs – every older child at his nursery school had and as children do had inquired extensively about this anomaly – but when it happened we weren't prepared even though in our adoption screening we had been extensively prepped.
But this, as with most things to do with our son, was on its head; he had identified with her, rather than comparing with us.
When we'd gathered ourselves my husband asked, "What colour am I?"
He thought a minute then referred to what he was most familiar with, his blocks, rummaged carefully through the box and triumphantly produced a block, holding it on high.
"Red!"
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