Lets start at the beginning (as one does). On Friday when I picked Nicola up from school her teacher commented to me that Nicola was really very funny that day. When I asked her why she told me that during the day she was asking the class to put away some toys and Nicola, out of nowhere, turned around and waved her finger at the teacher and said, “Hey! Jy’s cheaky.” as she was telling me this she was laughing so much it took a while to get through the story. apparently this is the first time one of the kids told her that… not too sure where Nicola picked that up, because it’s not something I ever say to her.

Saturday morning we were up and at it real early. We were at a kiddies party at 9! Actually since I knew we had to slip away for half an hour in between to go attend swim school we were there at 08:30. Esmeralda and Marco had a pirate themed party for their eldest son (3) and it was loads of fun. As mentioned we slipped away for a bit to go to our swimming class and then back again for more pirate partying and by the time we left there Nicola was so tired she hardly made it to the main road before she promptly fell asleep. Man…I would have loved to join her for that nap but someone had to do the driving.

We visited my folks in the afternoon and later on we all went over to my brother’s place with pizza for dinner (pasta for me since my teeth hurt way too much to chew pizza at the moment). My boet and his girlfriend were trying out something new this weekend, they had a young visitor (10 months old) – her brother’s son that they were babysitting for most of the weekend. The young man’s name is Nicolai, which confused the heck out of Nicola and she instead refers to him as baby-fly (not too sure what that’s about). The kids were doing well, even if they looked a little frazzled and they hadn’t even got to the sleepover part of the adventure yet. It’s a very brave person who will babysit someone else’s teething kid for a weekend, and an excellent audition for anyone thinking of dabbling in this parenting business I think. I checked on them Sunday morning and everyone made it through just fine, although getting up 4 times during the night for bottles was a bit of an adjustment for the lovebird. K actually said the sweetest thing to me after I checked on them. She said that she has a newfound respect for what I do with Nicola and that she thinks I’m doing a great job. Aaaw, very sweet – what a nice thing to say (and to hear). I hope they’ll do it again soon, I bet he’d be a lot easier on them when he’s not busy teething. He’s a real cuty though and you can tell that he’ll be up and running any day now – then the real fun starts.

Sunday we had Martha at our place to do a bit of a cleanup and ironing catchup again and Nicola and I spent most of the day at my folks. She was so funny when Martha came in though. She said, “Good morning Matha, how are you?” keep in mind that I don’t speak English to Nicola and Martha is actually Afrikaans too, so we were both equally surprised. When Martha started herding some of Nicola’s toys together, the pink terrorist was not impressed. She somehow came to the conclusion that Martha was trying to steal her toys and she was carting around as much as she could carry berating poor Martha quite loudly, “Nee Martha! Jy moet nie dit doen nie. Dis nie jou speelgoed nie, dis myne!” Eventually I managed to drag her through the bath and we got out of Martha’s way so she could get everything done (and dusted, pun intended).

At my folks place we had a lovely lunch, and I even took along one of our new freshly baked loaves of bread too. It worked out just beautifully, and as a special treat my mom made a delish chocolate baked desert. Very cakelike on the ouside and warm and goey on the inside – yum yum yum! Wanette came over a bit later too for a quick catch up and some tea, and I used the excuse to have even more pudding with her again (yeah, I’m not big on diets). I started knitting a scarf for my mom this weekend with the thickest fluffiest grey wool I have ever laid eyes on. It’s going to be gorgeous when it’s finished. I usually knit when Nicola’s asleep and I realised again why. She was peeping at this knitting business for some time, in between taking my wool hostage and kicking it around like a soccer ball and getting herself all tangled up in it. And then…when the oppertunity presented itself…like a flash she had hijacked one of my knitting needles and went on a “rampage” through the house waving it at everything going, “Bippity boppity boo!” (you may not be familiar with these magic words if you haven’t watched Disney’s Cinderella stories recently, but that’s what the fairy godmother says when she waves her magic wand at a situation). Definitely going back to knitting when she’s asleep!

We had a good weekend, but we were so busy I feel like I haven’t had any rest. Next weekend I’m definitely planning a quiet one. I need a nap!

How was your weekend?

Remember how I told you I had a tummy unhappy on Monday (of course you do), well I finally figured out what I did to deserve that. I thought it was a bit weird that my ulcer was acting up since I am not particularly stressed at the moment and that’s usually what sets it off.

It really starts with my teeth believe it or not! I haven’t been to the dentist in ages, mostly cause I didn’t have a problem and also I did not have money, so I let sleeping chompers be. However my teeth are killing me at the moment, literally my whole mouth is sore, especially after I eat something (a past time that I am rather fond of so it happens quite a few times a day).

Out of desperation I had two Disprins on Sunday, which I let dissolve in my mouth – that does really do wonders for sore teeth and gums by the way. In the process I conveniently forgot why I don’t take Disprin and haven’t done so for quite some years now…my somewhat dormant stomach ulcer.  (I’m actually a light-weight when it comes to pain meds, only have 2 panados every now and then and a bottle can last me mooooonths).

Anyway, I may have forgotten (briefly) about the ulcer but it did not forget about me. I had some Disprin again last night and so of course today I feel dreadful as expected (even though I chased it with a swig of Gaviscon). It appears that I am falling apart to a certain extent! My bits are not being compatible with each other at the moment. *sniff*

Thank goodness I have an appointment for next week Wednesday with the best dentist in the world (he charges a small fortune but he’s worth it *imagine a flick of the hair to go with that statement*), and until then I will try my level best to stick to soft squishy food and no pain meds.

Hope you all have a super fantastic weekend!

Back to the title of this post…

Last night Nicola and I were sitting in the bath relaxing, chatting and having a giggle – and when I looked over at her it just hit me how quickly she was really growing up! Anxious. It’s happening too fast! It feels like just yesterday when she couldn’t even sit up on her own properly, and here she is now chilling in the bath like a pro and chatting to me in full understandable sentences. My baby is a little girl.

Even though I’m not mad about how clingy she sometimes gets when I really need two hands to do something, it dawned on me, before you know it she’ll be an angry teenager and she won’t even want to give me a hug or the time of day and I’ll be missing my all day every day snuggles and the way she wants to help me with everything even if that means it takes three times as long to get it done.

She is so unbelievably cute at the stage where she is now. I totally get why a lot of people have this kind of age gap between their kids. You just forget about the colic and teething and everything else that may not have been so much fun and you think to yourself, “I could do this again – just look how cute she is!”

Well…I’m not exactly there (yet). As much as I’m enjoying this adventure I won’t do it as a single parent again. What I will take from this moment though is the message that I have to STOP rushing around so much and enjoy every second. Who knows what’s coming next and how quickly we’ll get there and this part is really awesome. I don’t want to miss a second of it because I was busy catching up on laundry rather than relaxing for a few minutes in the bath with my daughter and experiencing the little miracle she truly is.

Ps! On a lighter note and more or less on the topic of laundry. Our washine machine is in the garage, and it appears to have microsoft minutes even though it’s a samsung. For instance when you switch it on it tells you it’ll take 50 minutes and when you go there after 50 minutes it tells you there are still 18 left to go. Often I’ll say to Nicola, “Come lets go see how many minutes are left on the machine.” and then read out to her whatever it says when we get there. What Nicola has picked up from this experience is the expression “Veertien minute!” and she is convinced that that is the time span for almost any question relating to time. She also holds up any random number of fingers when she shouts it out, usually three fingers but on occasion more. I might ask her something like isn’t it your bedtime yet, and she will say no…still 14 minutes, yay! Or like this morning I said, “Nicola maak gou, ons is ‘n bietjie laat!” and she said, “Ja mamma, veertien minute!” Too funny, and she was actually right too – it was 14 minutes.

Nicola heard me groaning in agony at some point and she asked me what was wrong. I told her my tummy was hurting. Bless that child, do you know what she did? She kissed it better…too sweet. Those kisses, along with some black rooibos tea and a few swigs of gaviscon and I was almost good as new. But I bet the kisses helped most of all.

Yonk ago I bought a hologram Tinkerbell puzzle for Nicola to grow into at some point. Last night I decided to open it and have a look at it for the first time. It’s very pretty but let me be clear – I am soooo not buying one of these again. It’s bloody tricky since the pictures keep changing and if you don’t hold it at the perfect angle you’ll never figure out where it fits! Nicola was not to be deterred though – she just jammed them in anywhere where she could make them stick, not overly concerned with either of the two pictures we were trying to build. I’ve packed it away again afterward, maybe one day she’d like to try it again when she’s a bit older.

Mmm…I loaded two pics of the bread but I see only one made it. Oh well. *shrug* Steamcleaner, my rock star secret place manager, gifted me a breadmaker that she doesn’t use anymore. How awesome is that?! So last night Nicola and I made our very first mini loaf to try it out. It was so delicious that I have to admit I probably ate half of it warm just as it came out of the oven with thick  butter on it (thank goodness my tummy had settled by then!).

You actually cannot believe how good it smells when it’s baking. It fills up the whole house and makes your mouth water – yumm! It’s even got a little timer so you can set it to bake while you’re sleeping so you get to wake up to that wonderful smell. This machine is definitely going on holiday with us. I may have to roll home afterwards.

Ps! It dawned on me while the bread was baking that I do not actually own a bread knife and that I was meant to go and buy one before I started baking. Luckily I didn’t have to hack off chunks since I found a knife that will cut it even though it’s not a traditional bread knife – I actually forgot I had it since it came in a set of kitchen knives I bought years ago and this particular one I never used to it was still in the case along with the cleaver. What the hell would you use a cleaver on anyway?! I’ll need to find a safe place in my kutchen for the bread knife where little fingers can’t get to it. And I think I may need a bread tin too, if any of it ever makes it to the tin instead of my mouth.

How was your Monday?

We had such a great weekend really. Kind of made me think of something Marcia sometimes says about how THIS is how she imagined it would be if she ever had kids. It was that kind of weekend for me.

Saturday morning we slept till 7 (already a little piece of bliss itself) had a bath and a lazy breakfast. I did some laundry and pulled the house together a bit. We coloured in together a bit and then we made our way over to our first swimming lesson. This lady has a indoor heated pool in her house. When I say heated I don’t mean 30′C…it’s like bath water in there! She’s literally 5 minutes away from us and she is brilliant with kids. One of my colleagues recommended her to me and I’m so glad we went to go check it out.

Of course, me being me, we arrived about 20 minutes early, so we got to see quite a bit of the class before ours and by the time we hit the water Nicola wasn’t freaked out at all and knew more or less what to expect. She LOVED it and was laughing all the way. The teacher lets the kids say these rhymes while they do the excercises and even though we don’t have any of the rhymes down yet (except humpty dumpty) Nicola did all the excercises perfectly first time except for one. I get a warm fuzzy feeling about the whole situation and I’m completely convinced that this is the swim school for us. If you’re looking for swimming lessons in the Randparkridge area I’d definitely recommend this place.

After swimming we joined my mom and gran at Clearwater Mall for a bit of shopping and lunch and after that we went to my folks place where Nicola got to practice all her swimming excercises again in their pool. She loves swimming and being in the water and two swims in one day is just about as good as it gets as you can imagine!

Sunday morning Clayton came over to our place for breakfast and macgafter talks, and where Nicola is usually very shy and quiet around him she obviously now decided that she liked him after all. Chatterbox like you can’t believe! Clayton actually asked me when she started talking so well and I had to tell him that she’s been talking like that for ages…just not round him because she didn’t know him well enough yet. She took such a shine to him (I suspect because he watched a bit of Lion King with her while I washed the dishes), that she later on tried to call him from my mom’s phone and when my mom asked what she would say to him Nicola said that she was phoning him to let him know she’s home and he can come visit again.

In the afternoon we went to my folks again for a family braai. Again, usually when the crowd is more than about 10 strong Nicola stops talking altogether and gets very clingy, but it’s as if overnight she just decided not to be shy anymore and she chatted up a storm with almost every single person there and we both had a really good time. I had to giggle about the one thing she said though. My uncle Albert was busy baking bread in the kitchen and Nicola kept asking him questions about it and trying to help (bashing things with a wooden spoon mostly). Then at some point she turns around to me and says, “Mamma, Albit bak ‘n bwood!” I think my daughter thinks she’s a grown up, she only ever calls anyone oom or tannie if she doesn’t know their name yet.

And she ate all weekend every time something was given to her to eat – which is just about unheard of for her! And she slept like a champ (even though she dodged any attempt at putting her down for an afternoon nap). Maybe that’s why she was in such a good mood? Anyway, I had a really good time. It was just perfect.

If you aint giving it a 100%, you aint giving it to me. – Jacky Hefez

Love this buddy – profound!

So far so good…

 We had a magnificent sleep night last night. I feel on top of the world today!

Hope you’re all having a great Thursday, and if not – just hang in there…the weekend is just around the corner.