Category: Uncategorized

Daniel is very aware of wheat and that ‘it makes him itch’ due to his intolerances and eczema.  So in our home environment he knows what has wheat and what not.  And when he does get the odd hotdog he knows that it’s a treat.

Last night we were at my SIL’s house to celebrate my MIL’s birthday and she served Macaroni and Cheese for the kids (she makes some really awesome food) First thing Daniel says when he sees the food:  “Mom, is there wheat in this?”  

So, the meal continues and some of the kids nibble away, he’s sitting there not so sure about his food and then asks for dessert and of course we say “No, eat your food”

And I just thought about the mixed messages we give him about what’s good and not good for him and how confusing it must be.

DON’T eat wheat.  EAT your wheat.

And then he had some Ice cream for dessert.

And now he’s all itchy scratchy this morning.

Such a little parenting fail for us, sorry my boy.

ps  He also asked us yesterday whether we could please buy him a “boy dress”.

pps the big Christmas chaos starts today and I should not be lounging around blogging.  But I call it ‘organising my mind’.  Works for me.

It dawned on me today that there are 16 people coming for Christmas lunch on Saturday and I am pretty much flying solo.  Yes, my marvelous Husband will be here, but he cannot decorate to save his ass.  It also dawned on me that I 

1.  Have little or no idea how to decorate a Christmas table 

2.  Am utterly clueless as to how a proper Christmas menu works

3.  I have not wrapped a single gift

4.  I THINK all the gift shopping is done

Just about the only thing that’s organised is the meat.  Everyone knows what to bring (not that I’ll be eating any of it).  And there will be potatoes and rice.  The rest is, well, vague.

A friend suggested I visit the Martha Stewart website and I was all hyped up and couldn’t wait to get to my laptop tonight.  I was rubbing my palms in glee and had my pen and paper ready to take notes and make detailed lists. 

Only, my interwebs was borked.  My 3G was borked.  Broken.  Finito. Kaput.  Fast Forward to about 15 minutes ago when I finally decided, after much quality time on the phone to Vodacom, to plug my laptop into the actual modem and now I’m connected.  Only, it is now 10h55pm and I’ve run out of steam.  So, I’m going to do this little rant and go to bed with my (broken) pen and paper and make some lists.

I’m beginning to think it’s harder work to organise Christmas than to actually be AT work.

Doesn’t help that Husband is baffled as to why my nickers are in a knot.  He clearly missed the Mother and Mother-In-Law and Sister-In-Law coming over for lunch bit.  The man has no idea of the inner workings of the female mind.  If I fuck this up I’ll never hear the end of it.  Never. 

Updates to follow…

First off, just to let you know that my Mom finally came out of hospital today.  She is still quite weak, but we’ll keep an eye on her.  Thank you for all the kind words and for keeping us in your thoughts, much appreciated!

I finally took the plunge yesterday and bought “The Sound of Music” (or, Music Sound as Daniel calls it) movie and the kids LOVE it.  I, of course, make them watch it  from beginning to end.  I might consider using it as a form of torture after Christmas. hiehiehie, ‘listen to me or else I’ll make you watch THAT movie again.’

Here’s a question:

I was chatting to someone today about Christmas who told me that they celebrate the birth of Christ and buy gifts, but don’t teach their children about Father Christmas or do Christmas decorations just as I was launching into how fabulous Portable North Pole is.  They just tell their kids (aged 4 and 2) that they are ‘just lights on trees’  

As much as I respect their choice, to me it’s a little like double standards or am I just in consumerism-pit-of-hell?

Anyhoo, here is a photo of my Husband with the kids doing sandart (translates to: chucking multi-coloured sand all over the floor)  But they had fun 🙂

This morning my Mom calls from Ackermans, about to buy something for the girls.  She’s had a cold for last few days and sounds terrible and I remember thinking ‘stop shopping, go get into bed rather’, although I didn’t say anything at the time.  It was one of those arb conversations we have daily, me semi-listening as I’m always doing more than one thing at a time.

About an hour later my Dad calls asking me to come over and as I’m about to ask why, in the middle of the day when I’m busy working, I hear his voice break as he says “Your Mom’s lying on the bathroom floor, I’m waiting for an ambulance”.  I went flying out the door and off to their house, about 10kms from ours.

There she was, on the bathroom floor with a blanket over her, 2 pillows under her head (put there by my Dad) and him pacing away madly.  She couldn’t move, couldn’t squeeze my hand and couldn’t talk.  All I kept thinking was “don’t let her sleep, keep her awake”.  I had absolutely no idea what else to do, except for not freaking out.  And you all know how much I hate drama.

To cut a long story short, the ER24 staff were absolutely amazing and very thorough and after eliminating all the obvious things like overdose, stroke and heart failure, she was promptly carted off to hospital.

Where she is tonight in ICU with suspected pneumonia and recovering from anaphylactic shock caused (probably) by the antibiotic she started taking this morning.  When I arrived for visiting hours earlier she was already giving them a hard time about her heart and her chest X-rays, so she’s definitely on the mend thank goodness.

But I did get a huge fright today, I felt very helpless and small.  All I can see is her lying on the floor, I can only imagine what my Dad must have felt when he found her.

So, I promise myself that from now on I will listen better…

We finally managed to do Daniel’s Portable North Pole request and showed it to him last night.  He absolutely loved it and loved that Santa knew so much about him.  He kept on saying “Oh my goodness, oh my gosh”. His little face was priceless.  SO worth it, huge thanks to Luddite Lass that suggested it!

Here he is playing with my friend Leo’s iPad, he is such a 21 Century child:

Here a photo of the girls at Primi the other day.  That was an interesting lunch, lots of running and whining and watching children.  BUT, it’s nice to go out with them, even if it is just to make restaurant/shop staff nervous.

To the manager’s credit, he handled it very well when the girls both climbed on to this bike. (I in front, M on the back)

Lastly, here is Isabel this morning.  She had stickeritis.  I suspect she also has Mignon’s bug.  Guess how happy I am??

I haven’t done a post in DAYS, but the days are flying by in a mad panic.  It’s ridiculous.

1.

We had our Book club Christmas breakfast last week and we ended up talking about how you tell your children about strangers and not talking to strangers.  We live in a society where we try to teach our children to respect adults and they always have to greet them, but this is not always a good thing.  So, we demand our children greet strangers in shops that we talk to, but don’t realise that we could be exposing them to that person as they are no longer a ‘stranger’.   This story also came up.

It was a really arb conversation, but it really made me think as we are exactly like this, especially as we are often approached by people in shops because we have twins.  “oh look, are they twins” (ya think??), “oh look, are they triplets” (really, really we get asked this a lot) and my favourite:  “Are they girls?” (dude, seriously, they are wearing pink dresses, what do you think??)  

Our saving grace is that the kids don’t like strangers, so we normally deflect them by saying that our children are shy.  But I usually cringe a little inside, thinking that my kids are rude.  They aren’t, I’m being silly.  So, from now on, if a stranger comes up I’m going to not make my children greet them, sorry.  It is actually my job to keep them from harm.

What do you do?  How do you deal with it? Do you acknowledge when your children are not comfortable with a stranger?

2.

Mignon had the weirdest fever/snotty nose thing last week so she got carted off to the doctor.  She was just really miserable this weekend as well and still had a lingering temperature.  We thought she was just tired, so we tried to take it easy with her until we felt our patience stretch until we thought we couldn’t anymore.  Until it was bedtime and she refused to brush her teeth so we did it for her and her gums started bleeding, we got such a fright! Funny how, when there are 3 kids you don’t really watch what they eat with a hawk eye as you generally know they’ll catch up when they need to.  Only when we looked back over the weekend did we realise she didn’t eat well at all.  I felt SO bad.  And this morning she has blisters in her mouth, my poor baby, so Husband is taking to the doctor.  Hope she’ll be ok!

3.

Daniel is turning into quite a bug fanatic.  On Saturday I wanted to iron a pair of pants until a rain spider the size of my palm came crawling over the edge.  I must admit, I screamed like a girl, but no problem for my boy.  Between him and husband they took it out.  Yuk.

And here is further proof that he is totally fearless: (taken at Giraffe House, well worth a visit!)

I was very comfortable hiding behind the camera..

This is a tough one to do without sounding like a hypocrite. 

Drugs:

No thanks.  Dope, no problem.  I have friends that still enjoy the odd joint and it doesn’t bother me although I don’t partake these days (being Boring Mom and all).  The other stuff that usually comes in powder form or pill form?  Hell no.  Never have, never will.

Alcohol:

No problem.  I love my wine, in fact I sometimes think every Mom should be issued with a life-time supply of wine when they leave the hospital.  Within limits of course, as with everything in life. 

I bullied my dear friend Cazpi into taking Christmas pictures of our children, click here to see how gorgeous they are and come back tell me what you think!

In other news, the girls have their concert on Wednesday and they are apparently also having a fashion show.  In the bath tonight they were pretending that the soap dish was a CD player and doing little model walks, complete with hip twists.  I was gobsmakced.  Can’t wait to see the actual concert! 

Day 18 – Your views on gay marriage.

I worked in Hospitality for 8 years and some of my best friends are gay.  Do the math.

Day 19 – What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?

Toughie.

Let’s go with religion, politics bore me.  

I was raised in the NG Kerk and am what you could probably call ‘lapsed’.  I respect the religions and am fascinated by it.  Living in Cape Town you can’t not learn about the Muslim religion for example.

For me though I have my concerns about organised religion for myself and our children as much as I know my husband would like to start going to church regularly.  I want them to believe in a God of Love.  I don’t want them to sit in a church Sunday after Sunday because they hate being there and I forced them to be there.  I want them to believe what they believe now, all the amazing stories from the Bible and about love and forgiveness and faith.  I don’t want to taint them with stories of a wrathful God that punishes as that is not what religion should be about, surely?

I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m getting there.  This I know for sure:  

There is a God.  

He is a God of Love.  

He has a Son.  

Who died for our sins.

We are about to celebrate his birth. 

Surely that should be enough for a start?

OK, bear with me on this one.  It’s a toughie, but hear me out.

I read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats about 11 years ago and at the time no-one was really talking about free-range or hormone-free anything and we had just recovered from all the Mad Cow disease madness. (remember that?)  

I was never a big meat eater, but grew up in a house where you eat all the food on your plate and do not question brown stew (even the carrots were brown).  And vegetarians were equal to communists.

Someone in my bookclub bought this book.  On the cover it looked innocuous, about a half-Japanese/half-American documentary maker making a documentary to sell American meat to the Japanese market and she sets off with a television crew across rural America.

The book is funny and brilliantly written, but it has a rather chilling message about what goes into meat.  It is very, very well researched and well worth a read.  It also touches on infertility which, at that point in my life, wasn’t even an issue. Yet.

So, mostly due to this book I followed my instincts and don’t eat red meat.  I will eat the odd mince or piece of biltong these days, but wish that I could stop eating all meat.  Every time we feed our children chicken that is not free-range I feel bad, because we all know what goes into that and how it affects young children.  In reality it is expensive to live completely organic and free-range, but we try.  We try really hard.

Often people ask me why I don’t eat red meat and I’m not a tree-hugger or communist and not even really a vegetarian at that, and I don’t to launch into a psychotic babbling session about “this book I read”, but it makes me think of the book every time someone asks me.  So I guess it did change my views.

ps: She also wrote another book called All Over Creation that deals with genetic modification which was also very thought-provoking.