Sewerage and Wee Problems Diminishing!

Well the good news is that two of our big issues are getting sorted out.

Daniel's weeing in his pants is being sorted out through the use of a bit of psychology.

Fiona's poster for Daniel (four days complete)

Fiona drew a picture with a road leading to a jumping castle (the big incentive - we've promised that if he keeps his pants dry for five days in a row, we'll hire a jumping castle for a day). She then drew five cutouts of cars and trucks, one for each day he keeps dry. We also then positioned a blank outline of each cutout on the road to show how far we are and how far he has to go. The idea is that he gets to stick a car on the appropriate outline on the road. When all five are on the road, then it is jumping castle time!

Initially he lasted two days before have a bad day at school (they say it was due to the stress of starting a new school). Anyhow, after lots of encouragement, he embarked on the journey on Wednesday again, and today is day five of our consecutive dry days! So it seems to be working well. He does occasionally have a small leak in front which we ignore as he genuinely runs off to the toilet thereafter. Progress!

And then our neighbours had a plumber in last Sunday to clear their line so we don't have a sewerage pool building-up on the other side of the wall. Thank goodness as we've had a lot of heavy summer rain this week.

Otherwise we had John Thatcher from Stellenbosch visit is for dinner on Thursday night. All went well until he phoned us five minutes after he had left to say he had broken down at the end of our road. He thought that he had run out of petrol so we got some from a nearby garage. This made no difference, so we called the AA who arrived at midnight. The technician said it was the fuel pump which he managed to get going by connecting it to his portable charger. Anyhow, John stayed in our hastily cleared spare bedroom. On Friday morning, the AA towed the car to a dealer who undertook to fix it. Well, John waited until the end of the day before they told him it was ready (he spent the day walking around Hyde Park Shopping Centre which must have been quite boring after an hour or two). Anyhow, when it was time for him to pick up the car, they asked him to wait again. Turned out they had cleaned the car and got water on the coil so it had to dry out overnight. Anyhow, he ended up staying with us on Friday night too. On Saturday, we said goodbye for the third time and he got on his way! Quite an episode!

John before his first goodbye!

Fiona and I saw Avatar last night (Granny Jo did the babysitting). Well, what a movie. It blew us away - a new era of film making has arrived. Imagine sport in 3D. Hope the TV people are looking at the technology.

Emma has had an upset tummy for a week or two. She is not troubled by it so we've been giving over-the-counter medicine to remedy it. Anyhow, yesterday, she also developed an infected eye, so we decided to see our doctor who consults on Saturdays (thank goodness). Anyhow, the tummy is just something out of sync so we're giving her probiotics to get everything back in sync. Nothing to worry about. Her conjunctivitis is quite bad and we're applying medicine 4x daily and putting warm compresses on every hour.

Now just for this rainy weather to stop!