Category: Starting a Family
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A postcard from home is love in its purest form
When my children, aged 14 and 11, left with their mother to stay in Germany for a year, it was always going to be hard, for all of us. The children had just spent four months in my solitary care, and my house is now very quiet and empty, although littered with the evidence of…
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The things I learned about love, life, & padkos on Ouma’s family camping trips
To this day, when I see a hard-boiled egg or cheese on cream crackers, I’m taken right back to the times me and my cousins were piled in the back of a station wagon, passing the padkos Tupperware around and bouncing out of our skin in anticipation of our destination.
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The lovely, lazy joys of being a couch potato family
If we’re feeling altogether slothful, it’s a race to the couch for who gets the best spot, and who picks the movie. Sometimes, if we’re exceptionally lucky, our dogs will even let us enjoy the full couch experience, instead of snuggling in with us. Sometimes, but not often.
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Why I’m giving up trying to cycle my way to success
‘Oh good!’ said our trail-biking manager. ‘Imagine? Someone who can’t ride a bike!’ ‘Ha, imagine,’ I said with a nervous laugh. ‘How pathetic?’
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The sweet pain of trying to catch up with your teen
Parenting rattles you. We spend the first few years desperately trying to provide the most nurturing foundation for life. Then, seemingly overnight, we’re flung into the world of the tweens, and almost everything we were supposed to hold on to, we must let go of.
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How my bed became the love of my life
When I was circling the drain a year later and faced with the possibility of never going home to my bed again and having a cold steel hospital bed instead, I learnt that nothing else matters other than my health and the people I love.
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The bittersweet joy of your child learning to swim without you
At 10 and a half, she is in the golden age of childhood. Old enough to bake cupcakes on her own, but not so old that you worry she might be smoking cigarettes in the garage if you haven’t seen her for longer than 20 minutes. It’s a beautiful age to watch.
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How I fell in love in a moment in Dubai
One evening on my daily run, wading through the crowd on the bridge at Souk Al Bahar, the musical fountain started up. Instantly a forest of hands went up, each m clutching a mobile phone to record the sight – and BAM! – I suddenly realised that I was living through my mobile phone’s camera.
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A change is as good as a haircut
Younger sister had to consciously shift her understanding of who her brother was. She flushed, proud of him, as I watched her watching him. He was no longer the smelly older brother, but had transformed into a handsome young man.
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The Great Choose-a-Guardian Braai
My husband and I recently updated our wills. When I say recently, I’m including the six to eight months preceding the actual update, signing and safe storage. This included looking at our original choices of guardians and surreptitiously vetting them again.