Hmmmm.

Peaceful, here. All the children are asleep, and the first of the weekend laundry loads - towels - is whirring away in the washer. Peter is away on a work 'conference' - strange name for a 36 hour get together which is at best a team building exercise and at worst a complete piss up. Actually they seem to have worked quite hard this time to lean it towards the former and away from the latter, with a rather complex Amazing Race style trip to the venue this morning, and a murder mystery game this evening.

I'm a bit jealous - sounds like my sort of thing.

I am struggling to keep up with everything. I should really be working now, as I am constantly behind, but this constant blog neglect has to stop. At this rate I will lose all my reader.

Seems impossible to simultaneously keep up with work, household admin, domestic stuff, clutter control, holiday plans, and parenting. I have now taken a conscious decision to give up reading (!) for a few weeks to try and get some other things caught up.

The book that stands out most for me from this year's reads is The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenberger. Flawed, yes (hey, it's a time travel book), but intriguingly different.

Our holidays this year have been good so far - April saw us at Pumula with some friends (this was four days of total pampered-ness, happy kids and happy adults, lots of sun, water, good conversation, and amazing food) and in July the six of us were at Giants Castle which was also really relaxing. This coming September we are looking forward to our trip to Hluhluwe, just after Christmas we'll be down in the Cape with family, and then we have our annual January camping trip planned with friends.

Birthday party season also came and went since I last posted, and only Stevie's birthday tea is left. I love first birthdays. Stevie has just started walking and is indescribably adorable doing it. He is techno-mad and loves anything with a button. He likes to press the burglar alarm remote on my keys and hear the alarm arm and disarm. Naturally he loves to play with phones and it's no good hiding the home phone from him - he'll simply press the paging button on the base station and wait for the phone to respond from wherever we've squirreled it away. His vocabulary to date stands at 'outside', 'car', 'bye', 'atchoo', 'go', '(w)ater', and 'no'. He loves to climb in the shower. We don't support this activity too much. This morning he made a quick getaway from the bedroom and headed for the shower, saying 'No, no, no, no, no' on the way (just to save us the trouble).

Speaking of birthday parties, there were a couple of tense moments this year. At Robyn's party we had an art activity with non-washable paint, and I forgot to warn the moms to send kids in old clothes (eek). At Lauren's party we did t shirt tie dyeing which was a huge amount of fun except all the colours other than blue and green washed out of the shirts in the first wash, so we then had to frantically re-dye them before returning them to the kids Monday morning. Ironic to be stressing about getting paint out of clothes after Robyn's party, and getting it to stay in clothes after Lauren's.

A very sad bit this year was when some of our closest friends in the area (the sort of friendship in which you can doze off on each other's couches without causing offence) announced their decision to emigrate, and then a very happy bit three months later was when they changed their minds (or at least postponed for three or more years). Yay!