Some of our sloping ceilings are lined with thatching reeds, which gives them a warm feel as well as helping with insulation. Sometimes though they are a bit too natural... as when just now a vigorous rustling came from overhead, forging a path upwards and then a sudden plop, as a fat little mouse fell 15 feet to the floor by my desk, through the gap at the top of the reeds. He looked surprised for a moment, then carried on along the floor and headed round the corner into the bathroom, as our cat looked on impassively, with hardly a whisker twitching. So I guess the mouse is now having a change of scene under the bathroom floor, reveling in the fact that the cat is apparently on vacation. Said cat is now sitting as close to the keyboard as he possibly can, practically on top of the virtual mouse, tail flicking with barely suppressed impatience, as it is almost time for his supper. Perhaps he was worried that the mouse would spoil his appetite?
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The interview meme is doing the rounds again and I can't believe that it is already a year and a half since the last time I did it. Back then I sent questions to Charlotte and yesterday when I saw she had done another interview I couldn't resist asking to be interviewed by a real journalist - fame at last!! If you'd like me to interview you, leave me comment asking for questions and I'll think of some. These are the questions Charlotte asked me:
1. Your blog is a little quieter than it used to be. Are you a) tired
of blogging, b) too busy with with real life, c) blogging under a
pseudonym somewhere else? Discuss.
It is definitely b. I still love the blog world and am reading blogs as much as ever. Right now though my creative juices seem to be sucked up by work and everyday life, school, food, sleep, school food, sleep, leaving me with no inspiration to blog at the end of the day. It also has a lot to do with my work involving sitting in front of the computer all day, so that in the evening I hardly feel like sitting down to it anew. But I am determined to keep it going and am hoping for a new blast of inspiration to strike. Until them I’m relying on interviews, memes and food events to keep my blog alive and kicking!
2. Would you rather be a really famous food blogger, a really famous
book blogger or a really famous mommy blogger and why?
I really don’t want to be famous at all in any shape or form, I’m happy with small audiences of friends and family, the glare of the public eye would have me running and hiding! But if I had to choose one it would be as a food blogger – famous mommy bloggers have to take so much flak and open so much of their personal lives to criticism by all and sundry, so that the comfortable and friendly small scale mom blog transmutes into a controversial monster that is a free for all terrain for the mommy wars.. Food bloggers can lunch at wonderful places, talk about delicious meals, cook, enjoy sharing and only let people into their personal lives as much as they feel comfortable with! And for some reason people feel less inclined to criticise your food choices than your parenting choices. I’m not speaking from personal experience here at all – my blog friends and commenters are the loyal and wonderful few who keep coming back even if I don’t post for a week or two.
3. Money is no object. Describe your dream holiday.
A beautiful, comfortable and unpretentious house somewhere gorgeous near water, full of books and shady places to read them, boats and activities enough to keep everyone happy and a magical source of delicious meals completely unorganised by me appearing at regular intervals. Occasional excursions to beautiful historic Italian towns and markets for some art and culture and good friends and family joining us.
4. If Nigel Slater was catering your birthday party what three
recipes would you demand he made for you?
My birthday is in August which is usually still chilly here, so I would go for a really greedy and rich meal eaten overthe course of a nice long evening by the fire.
To start with I’d like him to cook us some grilled fish with lime leaves on the outside braai, so they’d be full of smoky flavour but with an extra zing from the lime leaves. We could start the meal early so he would be cooking at sunset and we could keep him company with a glass of wine by the braai!
Then a bit later we’d have his Italian slow cooked aromatic lamb, braised with orange, red wine and herbs with cannellini beans. Or else the Moroccan lamb shanks with aubergines ...
And this being a fantasy meal where we don’t need to worry about the seasons, we’d finish off with a fig tart with honey and mascarpone and still feel as light as a feather and able to dance till dawn …this is a fantasy after all.
5. You educate your children at a Waldorf school. What does the
Steiner philosophy mean for you and your family?
Do you want the short or the long version!?!
Short: – friendly comfortable school, where our kids thrive.
Long: – read on…
The Steiner philosophy is very broad and all encompassing, not just about education, and we don’t really live our lives by it. We really like his educational ideas and the way the primary schools work with it. Steiner really observed child development thoroughly and worked out what ages were best suited to learning certain things and what teaching methods worked best at which age. (Interestingly several of the new, modern schools here in Cape Town have adopted quite a lot of his methodology and also poached quite a few Waldorf teachers!)
He says that until the age of 6/7 children learn best by non-academic methods, really by observation and imitation and are busy taken up with learning about social interaction and their place in the family and the immediate world around them. Kindergarten is all about play, learning rhymes and rhythms and games, developing co-ordination, but with plenty of free play and physical activity. For our children it meant a really relaxed and positive start to their school lives.
Children in the first three years of primary school learn a lot through the use of stories, starting with fairy tales, then the stories of the saints, old testament and ancient mythologies over the years. Once they get to age 10/11 the stories evolve into history and science and a more academic but still holistic approach.
One of the more controversial things for most people is that the children only start to learn to read and write in grades 1 & 2 at quite a slow and thorough pace. We had to make a leap of faith for this too. I could read when I was five already and my children could easily have learned, if we’d tried to teach them then. However with our son we can now see the results. He started reading at the end of class 2, when he was about 8 and has been a voracious reader ever since. Our middle daughter is slower to read by herself but is doing well and looks set to take off any minute. Her writing is coming on well and that always seems to develop first with the Waldorf approach.
I think what this approach allows is more time for children to develop a broad and solid base of abilities: they draw their stories, learn them by heart, practise writing them and thus absorb them very deeply as they learn to read. They first learn the fine motor skills needed to form their letters, learn the patterns of the letters, the feel of them, then they learn first to write and only then learn reading from what they have written.
I like the way that subjects are integrated and the fact that the children remember effortlessly the things they learned several years ago, because they really did absorb them, rather than learn them by rote and then forget them again. They don’t use text books in primary school but write and draw their own main lesson books for each subject, which become really beautiful works of art.
I also like the way that spiritual development is considered important, but is fostered by stories and appreciation of beauty and the world around them rather than any specific religious teaching. They learn the bible stories as stories without any dogmatic baggage attached.
Waldorf gives children time to grow up at a child’s pace – they don’t rush things but still seem to get there, in a much less stressful way than traditional schools in our experience. Our son gets little bits of homework which he usually finishes off himself without any help in 10 minutes or so, while his friend at a good Cape Town school spends afternoons grappling and getting stressed out over his, leaving both him and his mother exhausted and fed up!
I think the two best things that our children have really gained from Waldorf, which they might not have got from a mainstream school, are self-confidence (they are all quite shy but have learned to speak in public and take part in concerts without thinking twice about it) and creativity, not just in the way they draw, but also in the way they are learning to think for themselves.
Having said all that we are looking at more mainstream high schools for our son in two years time, partly because the Cape Town Waldorf high schools are just too long a commute for us and partly because we think by then he’ll benefit from a more academic approach and with the Waldorf grounding we hope he’ll be able to keep a balanced and creative approach to life and hang on to that precious self-confidence.
The Rules of the Interview Meme
1. Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
1. Your blog is a little quieter than it used to be. Are you a) tired
of blogging, b) too busy with with real life, c) blogging under a
pseudonym somewhere else? Discuss.
It is definitely b. I still love the blog world and am reading blogs as much as ever. Right now though my creative juices seem to be sucked up by work and everyday life, school, food, sleep, school food, sleep, leaving me with no inspiration to blog at the end of the day. It also has a lot to do with my work involving sitting in front of the computer all day, so that in the evening I hardly feel like sitting down to it anew. But I am determined to keep it going and am hoping for a new blast of inspiration to strike. Until them I’m relying on interviews, memes and food events to keep my blog alive and kicking!
2. Would you rather be a really famous food blogger, a really famous
book blogger or a really famous mommy blogger and why?
I really don’t want to be famous at all in any shape or form, I’m happy with small audiences of friends and family, the glare of the public eye would have me running and hiding! But if I had to choose one it would be as a food blogger – famous mommy bloggers have to take so much flak and open so much of their personal lives to criticism by all and sundry, so that the comfortable and friendly small scale mom blog transmutes into a controversial monster that is a free for all terrain for the mommy wars.. Food bloggers can lunch at wonderful places, talk about delicious meals, cook, enjoy sharing and only let people into their personal lives as much as they feel comfortable with! And for some reason people feel less inclined to criticise your food choices than your parenting choices. I’m not speaking from personal experience here at all – my blog friends and commenters are the loyal and wonderful few who keep coming back even if I don’t post for a week or two.
3. Money is no object. Describe your dream holiday.
A beautiful, comfortable and unpretentious house somewhere gorgeous near water, full of books and shady places to read them, boats and activities enough to keep everyone happy and a magical source of delicious meals completely unorganised by me appearing at regular intervals. Occasional excursions to beautiful historic Italian towns and markets for some art and culture and good friends and family joining us.
4. If Nigel Slater was catering your birthday party what three
recipes would you demand he made for you?
My birthday is in August which is usually still chilly here, so I would go for a really greedy and rich meal eaten overthe course of a nice long evening by the fire.
To start with I’d like him to cook us some grilled fish with lime leaves on the outside braai, so they’d be full of smoky flavour but with an extra zing from the lime leaves. We could start the meal early so he would be cooking at sunset and we could keep him company with a glass of wine by the braai!
Then a bit later we’d have his Italian slow cooked aromatic lamb, braised with orange, red wine and herbs with cannellini beans. Or else the Moroccan lamb shanks with aubergines ...
And this being a fantasy meal where we don’t need to worry about the seasons, we’d finish off with a fig tart with honey and mascarpone and still feel as light as a feather and able to dance till dawn …this is a fantasy after all.
5. You educate your children at a Waldorf school. What does the
Steiner philosophy mean for you and your family?
Do you want the short or the long version!?!
Short: – friendly comfortable school, where our kids thrive.
Long: – read on…
The Steiner philosophy is very broad and all encompassing, not just about education, and we don’t really live our lives by it. We really like his educational ideas and the way the primary schools work with it. Steiner really observed child development thoroughly and worked out what ages were best suited to learning certain things and what teaching methods worked best at which age. (Interestingly several of the new, modern schools here in Cape Town have adopted quite a lot of his methodology and also poached quite a few Waldorf teachers!)
He says that until the age of 6/7 children learn best by non-academic methods, really by observation and imitation and are busy taken up with learning about social interaction and their place in the family and the immediate world around them. Kindergarten is all about play, learning rhymes and rhythms and games, developing co-ordination, but with plenty of free play and physical activity. For our children it meant a really relaxed and positive start to their school lives.
Children in the first three years of primary school learn a lot through the use of stories, starting with fairy tales, then the stories of the saints, old testament and ancient mythologies over the years. Once they get to age 10/11 the stories evolve into history and science and a more academic but still holistic approach.
One of the more controversial things for most people is that the children only start to learn to read and write in grades 1 & 2 at quite a slow and thorough pace. We had to make a leap of faith for this too. I could read when I was five already and my children could easily have learned, if we’d tried to teach them then. However with our son we can now see the results. He started reading at the end of class 2, when he was about 8 and has been a voracious reader ever since. Our middle daughter is slower to read by herself but is doing well and looks set to take off any minute. Her writing is coming on well and that always seems to develop first with the Waldorf approach.
I think what this approach allows is more time for children to develop a broad and solid base of abilities: they draw their stories, learn them by heart, practise writing them and thus absorb them very deeply as they learn to read. They first learn the fine motor skills needed to form their letters, learn the patterns of the letters, the feel of them, then they learn first to write and only then learn reading from what they have written.
I like the way that subjects are integrated and the fact that the children remember effortlessly the things they learned several years ago, because they really did absorb them, rather than learn them by rote and then forget them again. They don’t use text books in primary school but write and draw their own main lesson books for each subject, which become really beautiful works of art.
I also like the way that spiritual development is considered important, but is fostered by stories and appreciation of beauty and the world around them rather than any specific religious teaching. They learn the bible stories as stories without any dogmatic baggage attached.
Waldorf gives children time to grow up at a child’s pace – they don’t rush things but still seem to get there, in a much less stressful way than traditional schools in our experience. Our son gets little bits of homework which he usually finishes off himself without any help in 10 minutes or so, while his friend at a good Cape Town school spends afternoons grappling and getting stressed out over his, leaving both him and his mother exhausted and fed up!
I think the two best things that our children have really gained from Waldorf, which they might not have got from a mainstream school, are self-confidence (they are all quite shy but have learned to speak in public and take part in concerts without thinking twice about it) and creativity, not just in the way they draw, but also in the way they are learning to think for themselves.
Having said all that we are looking at more mainstream high schools for our son in two years time, partly because the Cape Town Waldorf high schools are just too long a commute for us and partly because we think by then he’ll benefit from a more academic approach and with the Waldorf grounding we hope he’ll be able to keep a balanced and creative approach to life and hang on to that precious self-confidence.
The Rules of the Interview Meme
1. Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
My head feels like we’re in the middle of winter, fogged up with the cold that the kids were so kind as to bring home from school and share with us. Snowy pictures all over the internet feel totally appropriate, except that our summer has reasserted itself and a hot wind is blowing off the mountains to give us an afternoon of 37C.
And yet, despite the oppressive heat, I’m in the kitchen baking, with the oven on, breathing in the scents of cinnamon, if only I could smell it properly. It’s the last day before the deadline for WTSIM and Jeanne has set us a challenge to do a sweet/savoury swap – to make a dish that is usually sweet with savoury ingredients or vice versa. I couldn’t quite get my head round it to start with, but then I started pondering the quiche. There’s no reason why that combination of pastry, egg and cream shouldn’t work as a dessert, with fruit instead of vegetables, sweet spices instead of salt.
I settled on plums and apples to go in it, with liberal amounts of cinnamon to convince us it was pudding. The plums weren’t very ripe, so I gave them a little help by turning them a la tarte tatin in a frying pan with butter, sugar and cinnamon until they started to soften a little. I didn’t quite get the caramelized effect I had in mind, but it did give them more depth and flavour.
For the pastry I used a sweet pastry recipe from Nigella’s How to Eat, that usually goes with our favorite apple tart. And then the egg and cream mix had sugar and cinnamon added to it instead of salt and pepper. Now I have to confess that I was a bit rough and ready measuring ingredients but I will try to make a guess, so that I can repeat it another time and share it with you, just in case you like the sound of it.
Because it actually did work! Our son , who refuses to eat savoury quiches but loves cinnamon, gobbled up his first slice and had seconds, and it got an accolade from my husband too, who isn’t so hot on egg dishes either.
Next time I wouldn’t serve it as a dessert when we had just eaten a quiche for a main course. Today I was just trying to minimize the cooking by doing two at a time and providing supper as well as a frivolous experiment for my blog, but the sweet quiche definitely deserves being made for its own sake and maybe I will add it to our pudding short list.
I think it was the tartness of the plums contrasting with the sweet creaminess of the filling that made it work, so it would work well with any other tart fruits, perhaps rhubarb or gooseberries would be good.
The Recipe – off the top of my head
Sweet pastry enough to line a quiche dish
For the fruit
6 large plums
2 apples
30g butter
1/3 cup of sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
For the filling
3 eggs
1 cup 250ml cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup of sugar
Quarter the plums and remove the stones. Peel, core and cut the apples into thick slices. Melt the butter in a frying pan, add the sugar and cinnamon and allow to bubble a bit. Add the plums and apples and turn in the buttery mixture, till they are all coated. Cook gently for 5-10 minutes until they are just starting to soften but still keep their shape.
Line a quiche dish with the pastry.
Whisk up the eggs, cream, sugar and cinnamon.
Arrange the fruits in the pastry. (You can keep the left over liquid from cooking to use as a sauce if you like.) Pour over the cream mixture. Sprinkle with a bit more cinnamon.
Bake at 190C for about 40 minutes until golden and set.
Feel free to play with the amounts. I was doing it by guesswork anyway. You might like more or less sugar depending on the fruit and your taste.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
My girls have been asking for pitta bread the last few days. I meant to make it last night for supper with meatballs, but forgot and ended up making shepherds pie with the defrosted mince instead. So this morning I’ve kneaded up some dough and left it to rise, hoping it will be ready in time for lunch after a leisurely start to the day.
In term time we treasure our Saturday morning lie-ins, which threaten to become a thing of the past if our son decides to join the cricket club. He is going to go to a training session and see how he likes it on Monday and they have matches most Saturday mornings. Our days of staying home at weekends are fading. Youngest has finally got us to arrange riding lessons for her, also starting Monday, so I have visions of us getting caught up in a whirl of our children’s extra mural activities just like those city parents I have been sympathizing with up till now.
We felt that we should offer Middle Daughter the chance to start some activity too, so found out about dancing lessons. She dithered a bit and only quite liked the idea. What she really wanted was for Dad to teach her photography, she said, as she wants to be a photographer when she grows up, like him. After looking at all the uniform and shoes required by the dancing school I breathed a sigh of relief - one less place to have to chauffeur a child, one less set of engagements to cram into a potentially hectic schedule, one less set of expensive equipment for a child to grow out of and need replacing. So Dad is committing to one proper lesson a week for her.
It’s not that we want to be mean and deprive our children of the chance of creative expression – it’s just that living in the country we already do 90km per day just on the school runs. Most of the activities they could do are in one or other local town, further away than school, at times that mean a separate round trip of another 50 – 90 km each time. Our clever idea of finding activities for all three that coincided more or less, just doesn't seem to work - different days, different times, different places. So up till now we have reckoned that they get enough creative expression between home and school.
So we shall see how all this goes. At 10 our son needs the chance to develop his natural sporting talents and that is the one thing Waldorf doesn’t really do – they do plenty of ball games and physical activities, just not conventional competitive sports.
And Youngest has been crazy about horses for a while now (unicorns too, but we couldn’t find a unicorn riding school in our area), so we thought she should learn properly now she is 6 and see if it will become a true passion or not, before we are cajoled into giving a horse a home on our farm. We have the space but I know they are demanding creatures and I am not a natural when it comes to horses, we just don’t have that telepathic connection – there is a blank wall between our minds.
The last time I rode, the horse bolted at the sight of a hare and I slid gracefully to the ground breaking a rib or two. I also have memories as a child of being left dangling from the low branch of a tree by the pony that was nominally mine, as he took the shortest route home, undeterred by my attempts at steering him. Nor could he ever be persuaded to go over the lowest of jumps for me, though he would do it for other people.
So if Youngest becomes a horse-mad girl she will have to do most of it herself and I will be venturing into new territory and a new social scene – the world of gymkanas and rosettes and horse boxes. But my imagination is leaping ahead here. Her first lesson is on Monday, Let it take her where she wills and may she not be dumped to the ground too often.
This post was going to be about food. The pitta bread is now shaped into rounds and rising once more. Now I need to bake it, so my extra mural digression will have to be the post itself. More about food another time.
How do you all cope with children's extra-mural activities?
In term time we treasure our Saturday morning lie-ins, which threaten to become a thing of the past if our son decides to join the cricket club. He is going to go to a training session and see how he likes it on Monday and they have matches most Saturday mornings. Our days of staying home at weekends are fading. Youngest has finally got us to arrange riding lessons for her, also starting Monday, so I have visions of us getting caught up in a whirl of our children’s extra mural activities just like those city parents I have been sympathizing with up till now.
We felt that we should offer Middle Daughter the chance to start some activity too, so found out about dancing lessons. She dithered a bit and only quite liked the idea. What she really wanted was for Dad to teach her photography, she said, as she wants to be a photographer when she grows up, like him. After looking at all the uniform and shoes required by the dancing school I breathed a sigh of relief - one less place to have to chauffeur a child, one less set of engagements to cram into a potentially hectic schedule, one less set of expensive equipment for a child to grow out of and need replacing. So Dad is committing to one proper lesson a week for her.
It’s not that we want to be mean and deprive our children of the chance of creative expression – it’s just that living in the country we already do 90km per day just on the school runs. Most of the activities they could do are in one or other local town, further away than school, at times that mean a separate round trip of another 50 – 90 km each time. Our clever idea of finding activities for all three that coincided more or less, just doesn't seem to work - different days, different times, different places. So up till now we have reckoned that they get enough creative expression between home and school.
So we shall see how all this goes. At 10 our son needs the chance to develop his natural sporting talents and that is the one thing Waldorf doesn’t really do – they do plenty of ball games and physical activities, just not conventional competitive sports.
And Youngest has been crazy about horses for a while now (unicorns too, but we couldn’t find a unicorn riding school in our area), so we thought she should learn properly now she is 6 and see if it will become a true passion or not, before we are cajoled into giving a horse a home on our farm. We have the space but I know they are demanding creatures and I am not a natural when it comes to horses, we just don’t have that telepathic connection – there is a blank wall between our minds.
The last time I rode, the horse bolted at the sight of a hare and I slid gracefully to the ground breaking a rib or two. I also have memories as a child of being left dangling from the low branch of a tree by the pony that was nominally mine, as he took the shortest route home, undeterred by my attempts at steering him. Nor could he ever be persuaded to go over the lowest of jumps for me, though he would do it for other people.
So if Youngest becomes a horse-mad girl she will have to do most of it herself and I will be venturing into new territory and a new social scene – the world of gymkanas and rosettes and horse boxes. But my imagination is leaping ahead here. Her first lesson is on Monday, Let it take her where she wills and may she not be dumped to the ground too often.
This post was going to be about food. The pitta bread is now shaped into rounds and rising once more. Now I need to bake it, so my extra mural digression will have to be the post itself. More about food another time.
How do you all cope with children's extra-mural activities?
Monday, January 19, 2009
Swimming in the dam and trying out the kneeboardWe’ve just spent the last weekend of the holidays camping on the edge of Clanwilliam dam with friends. They have a motor-boat and all the toys, so the children were introduced to the delights of being pulled through the water fast behind a boat, on a doughnut or a kneeboard.
Youngest proved to be the speed-queen with the older two more cautious, but at the end of the day their favourite activities proved not to be the fast stuff. For Youngest it was swimming back from the boat to shore with Dad (quite a distance, but they were wearing life jackets and had boogie boards to rest on).
The other two loved it when we took the boat upstream and landed on a sandy beach, to spend an hour digging and lining their own dams with clay and constructing elaborate waterways. The whole weekend was a great end to the holidays and also distracted them from the imminent return to school and the incipient gloom that was threatening.to engulf us all.
Bleary-eyed breakfast outside our tentThis afternoon we have managed to use up most of the casualties of an inadequate cool box: the milk that miraculously survived two days but wasn’t going to last any longer and was just developing a yoghurty consistency; the butter that had liquidified on the return journey and then set to golden hardness in the fridge overnight. Crustless milk tart is a very forgiving recipe and we have now done our own magic – turning the inedible into a treat! Maybe it will even make it into tomorrow’s lunch boxes to brighten up the beginning of term.
View from our tent at breakfast timeTuesday, January 13, 2009
Today I have been sewing sequins onto our mozzy nets. Not just to make them look pretty, but in a last ditch attempt to patch up every single last tiny hole or ladder that could permit entry to the desperate breed of mosquitoes that have just taken up residence here.
We’ve had these nets ever since we got here seven years ago now. It is dry where we live, so usually we only have a few mozzies around, but even just one buzzing in your ear is enough to ruin a night’s sleep, so we tend to sleep under them anyway. The children like the security of them and choose to sleep under them even in winter, when never a mosquito dare brave the chill. At least, there was one point when Middle Daughter, aged about three or four, refused to have the net put over her at bed-time. Our son, an Animal Planet devotee, then casually enquired how exactly it was that female mosquitoes could kill you … she reached for the net without another murmur and has slept under it ever since!
Anyway these nets are now well-worn and patched, with multiple little ladders where the fabric has caught on Velcro or bed posts or something. Our usual run of mosquitoes aren’t really very cunning and have never found their way in. I have been able to hear a buzz behind my head and go back to sleep, knowing that it can’t catch me from that side of the net.
Not so this latest mozzie gang. They are masters of the break in, veterans of the smash and grab. I’ve sewn up the big holes, tucked in the nets and still woken up to the jeer of a well fed female mosquito as she buzzes away from my hand. They lurk all day at the top of the net, just waiting for you to come back to bed. I’ve upped the stakes and used a mosquito repellant on us. The overhead fan whirs all night long. They don’t care. The last few nights I have been found at midnight leaping around on the bed, trying to squash the latest mozzie that is just out of reach at the top of the net …and then again at four o’clock. They’re fierce and persistent this lot. Youngest has also been plagued, coming to ask Dad to catch mozzies at midnight too.
So lots more sequins have been sewn on today and she is now firmly tucked in. We all need our sleep and have donated quite enough blood already. The nets are nearly as pretty as the Christmas tree by now and I’ve had enough of trying to thread needles when I can no longer even see the eye... must get some new glasses. Now I'm off to find the antihistamine cream - they've been chomping my ankles as I've been writing this!
We’ve had these nets ever since we got here seven years ago now. It is dry where we live, so usually we only have a few mozzies around, but even just one buzzing in your ear is enough to ruin a night’s sleep, so we tend to sleep under them anyway. The children like the security of them and choose to sleep under them even in winter, when never a mosquito dare brave the chill. At least, there was one point when Middle Daughter, aged about three or four, refused to have the net put over her at bed-time. Our son, an Animal Planet devotee, then casually enquired how exactly it was that female mosquitoes could kill you … she reached for the net without another murmur and has slept under it ever since!
Anyway these nets are now well-worn and patched, with multiple little ladders where the fabric has caught on Velcro or bed posts or something. Our usual run of mosquitoes aren’t really very cunning and have never found their way in. I have been able to hear a buzz behind my head and go back to sleep, knowing that it can’t catch me from that side of the net.
Not so this latest mozzie gang. They are masters of the break in, veterans of the smash and grab. I’ve sewn up the big holes, tucked in the nets and still woken up to the jeer of a well fed female mosquito as she buzzes away from my hand. They lurk all day at the top of the net, just waiting for you to come back to bed. I’ve upped the stakes and used a mosquito repellant on us. The overhead fan whirs all night long. They don’t care. The last few nights I have been found at midnight leaping around on the bed, trying to squash the latest mozzie that is just out of reach at the top of the net …and then again at four o’clock. They’re fierce and persistent this lot. Youngest has also been plagued, coming to ask Dad to catch mozzies at midnight too.
So lots more sequins have been sewn on today and she is now firmly tucked in. We all need our sleep and have donated quite enough blood already. The nets are nearly as pretty as the Christmas tree by now and I’ve had enough of trying to thread needles when I can no longer even see the eye... must get some new glasses. Now I'm off to find the antihistamine cream - they've been chomping my ankles as I've been writing this!
Monday, January 12, 2009
A summer holiday in South Africa absolutely must involve water of some sort.
It could be a swimming pool, where, even if it isn't warm enough to swim, you can fish for leaves with your new nets, in front of a stunning view.
Or a lagoon at low tide where you can paddle for miles and collect hermit crabs until your net is bursting.
Or a forest rock pool with peaty brown water fresh from the mountains, to cool off in after the precipitous scramble down from the ridge.
It could be a pristine beach in a Nature reserve, deserted even in the busiest holiday week of the year...
... where you can relocate sea snails into dense urban colonies as the waves wash them over the sand.
Or perhaps best of all for swimming is a calmly flowing river, brown with peaty mountain water, salty from the lagooon tide and just wide enough to make swimming the whole way across feel like an achievement, with little fish to catch in nets once more.If you're very lucky you could have all those water experiences in one week, especially if your holiday is in Knysna, with rides on boats an added extra.
Thanks to my mother for treating us to a wonderful holiday up there. We're back now and slowly and reluctantly adjusting back to our everyday routine. I hope you had wonderful holidays too, even if of a more wintry variety for most of you!
Happy New Year!
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