Shattering End to the Day

I am typing this on Peter's new baby laptop. It measures about 22 by 16 cm and is designed for elves perhaps, or people with very thin spindly fingers.



One has to try to avoid requiring the backspace, shift or tab keys, otherwise - and oops it just happened again - one tends to get totally the wrong key resulting in disconcerting window behaviour such as one's entire blog post window disappearing (for instance).

At least I am blogging, and a mere three days after the last post!

Today was exhausting, despite the fact that I hardly saw the children.

Today was the day to finally get (finally to get, if you are predisposed to find split infinitives offensive), the Tow Bar and Bike Rack, which has been on the agenda for approximately 360 days (do the maths) so that we can carry all of us, and our stuff, and our bikes in One Car! Repeatedly having to take two cars on holiday and on bike riding excursions has lost its novelty value. The only thing going for it is that the kids and I can take off in the morning and Peter can join us 8 hours later when he finishes off 'writing a few emails for people at work'.

I left home at 11.30 this morning on Tow Bar Mission and returned 5.30. Fortunately I decided to leave Stephen at home with his siblings and grandparents otherwise both of us would have been very tired and miserable by the end of the day. Tow Bar Place is not close and is not speedy. However, I am now the proud owner of a smart new tow bar and four-bike bike rack. Tow Bar Guy was so proud of his efforts I didn't have the heart to tell him we will soon need to carry five bikes and ultimately six. (I am working on convincing Peter to get a baby carrier for Stephen to ride on the back with one of us; once we have that there'll be no reason not to buy a second adult bike - the fifth bike.)

During the long wait I

• watched a bit of daytime TV; evidently xhosa daytime tv is no less mindless than its english counterpart
• read some of my new library book (my resolve to put reading on hold so as to catch up on other things lasted about 72 hours; I was unable to hold out when taking the kids to the library; pathetic I know but just imagine visiting a library and not coming out with a book for yourself....)
• got picked up and taken to lunch by Peter who took pity on my plight (I think he got the hint I wanted to be fetched when I said 'please can you come and fetch me').
• bought Stevie a birthday present
• bought myself some new summer clothes

So all in all a long but successful day. Which was not yet finished.

Came home and started to help Lauren plan tomorrow's design technology project, and since we are about to hit the First of Spring, the project is to construct a flower in a container from waste materials. Think cardboard tubes, coloured paper, crepe paper, balloons, yoghurt pot, coffee tins...

Got a huge shock when, just after saying goodbye to Peter's parents, there was a crash and a scream from the other end of the house. It was Robyn screaming Mom! Mom! and I thought the worse for a moment (Stephen, bath, etc) and then I remembered of course he wasn't in the bath and we all raced up the passage to find Stephen on the floor, Robyn in the shower, a mountain of broken glass everywhere and Robyn holding the remains of the shattered shower door.

Very, very frightening.

Stephen must have pushed it very hard. He was sitting on the bathroom floor while she showered. One connector was broken and it made the door swing in the wrong direction and hit the wall.

The shower door is made from that safety glass which sort of crumbles, so only minor cuts fortunately (just a scratch on Stephen) but it could easily have been so much worse had Robyn not caught the remains of the door. I am so proud of how well she did. She said she knew she had to catch it (cutting herself in the process) to stop it falling on him.

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!