Beautiful boy

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.”

Milan Kundera

Wolves

The daughter recently refused to sleep in her own bed on account of wolves! “Wolves”, you may cry, “but there aren’t even any wolves in South Africa – unless you count those hybrid uber-glam husky dog X timber wolf DOGS that abound of late for security purposes”. No, not those wolves – we’re talking the howling embodiment of evil kind of wolves.




The daughter was convinced, having heard it from many reliable picture books, that wolves were very bad news and were now seeking refuge and perhaps a girl-sized snack in her room. So, I trawled the web searching for pictures of wolf cubs and reports of their love and loyalty to each other and even found that awesome picture of Rama And Raksha from Jungle book (see Friday’s post) to show her how lovely and actually non-scary wolves are. You see ,I don’t want her growing up with fear, it’s part of my whole free-range effort but it is fraught with difficulty. I am very very afraid of the gheckos that live in our house – there are so many and they make me feel quite ill with fear but I have told the daughter that these lovely lady reptiles are also moms (their offspring are legion – oh happy times!) and are so concerned for her welfare that they station themselves in her room to catch all the mosquitoes before they bite her. Now if only I could convince myself to believe in the benign mommy-ness of the ghastly things. But the daughter is not afraid and so I congratulate myself. I have also managed to eradicate the fear of monkeys – despite the efforts of her pre-school to the contrary – those kids are practically hiding under the tables when the monkeys visit - but they are way too frequent callers to fear. So instead of pelting them with cooked potatoes or spraying them with the hose I talk to them in a civilised manner – suggest they move along and then point out their extreme cuteness to the daughter. These vandalizing thieving critters (who have on more than one occasion trashed our house in search of lunches) are actually JUST LIKE US and look at how the babies hang onto the moms when they run across the telephone lines – too adorable!

Okay there is a point to all this self-congratulatory bollocks and it is this: I can talk the daughter out of some of her fears but I still can’t keep her safe. I can’t stop her from watching another child at pre-school kill a ghecko for fun. I can’t stop her engaging in the doctor-doctor games or from discussing child-birth and boobs and kissing with her girl-friends and I can’t stop her from wanting to grow up quickly . Last night she told me that she is going to be a mermaid when she grows up and that she’ll also have boobs! I told her that yes, she would have boobs one day but that there are many years ahead to worry about boobs and that she should concentrate on her swimming rather if she was planning to become a mermaid. In my head of course, I’m taking her out of school and putting her into a nunnery until she’s 25. Why do they have to grow so fast? I feel like I’m spending my time with her doing damage control! And I still have to properly coach her in ‘stranger danger’ – it’s just exhausting!

Then this morning the little face looks up at me and says; “Mommy I had a bad dream”
“What happened”?
“There was a big scary snake”..



No problem!

Home time Friday

Live in joy, in love,
even among those who hate.
Live in joy, in health,
Even among the afflicted.
Live in joy, in peace,
Even among the troubled.
Live in joy, without possessions,
Like the shining ones.

Solemn seamstress and the hand-made bat

A suitably bleak and goth expression considering the company I'm keeping

Earth day - dearth day

Happy Earth day! We are fortunate here in Africa in that we never take electricity for granted - our power has just this minute come back on. This brings Pietermaritzburg up to three power failures in four days! But never fear, the World bank has recently granted our government a fat loan to build a whole lotta belching coal powered Electrical plants. At least we will be distracted by any pesky environmental concerns by being able to plug in our appliances and turn on our lights.

Fearful Free-ranging and the Football horror

Lenore Skenazy is my new hero!

If you haven’t read her blog Free range kids - do so now! It is brilliant and she is brilliant and won the ‘bloggie’ for the most controversial ‘mom blog’. Basically she advocates allowing your child to grow up playing in the open, riding bikes to school and learning independence. She’s the antithesis of the helicopter mom and came under a lot of fire for allowing her 9 year old son to ride the subway alone. She says it’s possible to raise a self-reliant, confident child without sheltering them from everything – I think it’s brilliant. Really. But..

I make no secret of the fact that I am a paranoid parent, my previous posts can attest to that, but I really try hard not let the daughter see it! At the park, when my husband swings her around so she gets dizzy and collapses on the ground laughing her head off and begging him to do it again, I walk a fair distance away and pretend to be absorbed in something else. Every instinct screams “NO! She’ll throw up, you’ll drop her, it’s bad for her, she’s too heavy for you” (to husband). Truth is she’s having a fantastic time and she doesn’t have the tendency to vomit at the slightest gravitational alteration and so I shut up. This weekend, we took her through the park to peek through the fence at her new school (yes, the one with cell-phone tower) all I could think of was that perverts and weirdos could do the same thing during school hours – selling them crack or exposing their junk. You see, this is what it’s like in my head! But I didn’t mention it – I just told my husband quietly later and got laughed at and then my mom who sympathized.

So, my biggest obstacle in free-range parenting is my own Hollywood-esque imagination. But I do live in South-Africa and we have a whole set of different issues here – perhaps my paranoia is justified – we do have a high crime rate (one of the highest in the world) - can I really subscribe to free-range parenting? I wonder?..

I do however believe very firmly in not submitting to paranoia. A spate of e-mails circulated recently warned about the increase in human trafficking over the world cup period and how we need to be very vigilant with our children lest they be abducted by dubious football fans. But one in particular suggested stock-piling food and necessities to ensure that you don’t have to leave the safety of your house for the entire five week period over the World cup.

Come on people – surely this going to the extreme?

The daughter recently accompanied us for a tour of the midlands meander and we stopped at a beautiful shop that had a jungle-gym and rope swing outside. I stood on the verandha and watched her playing. Another mom appeared with her own child and mine happily engaged them in conversation. I walked over (PARANOIA!) and the mother said to me in shocked tones, “she is so FRIENDLY – you must be careful”.

And there was I thinking friendliness was a good thing… sigghhh…

So lovely..

Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam

Web Presents

I spent a chunk of Sunday improving my self-esteem creating the above passably cute (I think) red dragon from a pattern provided by wyrm - created by a guy 'nogal' - I am always impressed by men that can sew!

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of what I call "pretty blogs" - for example: posy gets cosy - which also features a cameo appearance from man that can sew! And this one here

and my current favorite: DOTTIE ANGEL

These blogs are awesome - beautifully put together, nicely written and full of pictures of beautiful things, pets, recipes, crafting tips etc etc. They speak to the girly me of me that dreams of domestic goddess-hood - of pottering around in my lovely (imaginary) olde-worlde house growing herbs and sewing smocks for the daughter whilst whipping up a fair trade-vegan-organic-macrobiotic feast and then darting off to my 'office' to blog about it and post photographs of my achievements.

Yes, when I started blogging that was what I had in mind - turning my desolate landscape of a garden into a flowery herb-scented paradise and my galley kitchen into the backdrop of organic gastronomy. Sadly this has not transpired but I am inclined to think it's not a bad thing. Christ almighty! Imagine the pressure of trying to take artistic pictures of my home to showcase my design flare and vintage chic style, ecspecially when our home can really only be (generously) described as compact. The effort involved in convincing daughter to make her bed and of encouraging the maltese to shift himself from the couch (without requiring me to rush to the emergency room for stitches) combine to make the very idea of 'pretty-blogging' damn near a risky and terrifying concept and certainly not one that I could contemplate. I will leave that to the professionals - do visit their blogs they really are fabulous and a wonderful form of escapism while contemplating your computer screen at work.

Because it's my blog and I can - I'm sending a gift of a virtual mustard bath to my soul seestah who has a lurgy.

The tower....

I wrote a list of all the things I wanted in a school for my daughter.. Radioactive emissions wasn't near the top. I was thinking of abstract things - well, like appreciation of cultural diversity, tolerance, well-kept grounds, a good curriculum, perhaps an animal or two, trees, space - that kind of thing.

So when I realised that my budget would only allow me to choose from a handful of local government schools I accepted that (with no grace at all - in fact with a lot of cursing and rending of clothing and vows to move the family out of the house and into the car) and began looking at my options. There weren't that many. One school was ruled out easily by their insistence that Grade 1s play hockey - my God - why not just clobber them on the shins at orientation and get over with - it'd be much cheaper..

So I found a school - nice enough, lots of trees, a good ethos (only 15 minutes of homework for Grade 1s), an interest in the arts and an impressive swimming coach, aftercare offered and just up the road from the office AND a great big hulking hideous cell phone tower! Right over the swimming pool. Honestly, I flirt with enviromentalism - I'm not a die-hard but I try and recycle and keep electricity usage at an acceptable level, I buy organic and lots of rose-geranium oil. But when I saw that cell-phone tower lots of alarm bells went off. And that marked the beginning of my research.

The purpose of this post is that hopefully someone else experiencing my dilemma will be directed to this post early in their search and be saved the time it takes to find out that...

the jury is out. They may be hazardous, they may not be, noone really knows for sure the long term effects and both sides have very convincing arguments. As of 2010 the technology is developing so fast that government can't keep up and provide policing and here in the developing world it probably isn't high on the agenda anyway. The bottom line too is that the school is receiving monthly payments from the networks and cash-strapped state schools can't really be sneezing at that.

Anyway I thought we might move - out of Pmb up to Hilton , the land of schools with fairy gardens and musical programmes - we took a tree-lined drive to have alook and sighed and ooo-ed and ahh-ed at the beauty of Hilton. We looked at the school and it's beautiful, old styley buildings and many trees and we breathed in the fresh clean air and thought perhaps a move would not be a bad thing and then we turned around to look at the view:

siggghhhh.....