The Week After Easter ...

The week after a four day weekend (Stephen) and a six day break (Fiona) is so busy that we both just did not get to the blog.

Easter was very quiet - a nice break.

Both twins marked it with very stinky, very fluid, very large poos! Not the greatest news to start with but these were BIG! It wasn't diarrhoea but due to teething. Emma's first tooth is now threatening to break through - it has caused minor bleeding under her skin. So we're expecting a sparkler in her mouth soon ...

The weather on the weekend was cool for the first three days and so we stayed inside for most of the time. On Sunday, the sun started coming out and we spent some time in the garden before thunder sent us scurrying inside. On Monday, we had a wonderful sunny day which was spent at a braai with our friends Nadia and Brett.

We have not really exposed them to sweets and chocolate, and so we were pleasantly surprised when they both preferred fruit to a block of chocolate on Easter Sunday. Dad and Mom had to finish the rest - a very tough task you must understand.

We are doing lots of walks around the garden - after work to collect the post. The highlight being a sighting of the dog across the road. A sighting is characterised by lots of "woof, woof, woof." Emma said "dog" yesterday but today said nothing besides the usual "woofs."

They are both looking a great deal sharper with them noticing things far quicker, and often from a distance. Our chief means of communication is to point at things and Emma has a special little moan if she wants her dummy retrieved after she threw it out of the cot.

The evenings have recently been characterised by one of them have an absolute fit - last night Daniel's fit was initiated by us taking a plastic hammer away from him when he tried to break one of the windows. They refuse to be lured to another activity and will just throw away everything given to them. We tend to just offer lots of love, hugs and dummies until the fit ends. If it goes on, life carries on around them as if nothing has happened.

A nice feature is that they are prepared to walk to their bedroom after supper when it is "bye-bye" time. They then generally go to sleep relatively easily.

We've put up a kiddie gate between the kitchen and the passage- given to us by Liz - a colleague at work. We used to close the door which brought very loud protests. They now climb onto the gate to watch things going on in the kitchen.

Liz also gave us a box of her son's old toys which went down really well. They got a whole lot of megablocks plus a set of plastic food (all sorts of food and fruit) which gets played with a great deal. The house is a complete mess!

Tonight we swapped cots for about 20 minutes. They however then made it very clear that they had to sleep in their own cots.

Its weekend tomorrow night! Yippee - and then on Sunday Granny Lesley arrives for a weeks visit (yippee)!

Our great discussion point is alternative energy to get around the Eskom issue. Quite a lot of exciting options available. One thing we have realised is that South Africa is energy rich and it is all free (i.e. the the sun). Strange thing is that we just don't use it, and instead pay for energy to be supplied to our houses at ever-increasing cost.
Anyhow, we have decided that a generator will just make us reliant on a high fuel price and will not actually solve anything! So we're looking at getting a solar heating system for hot water, and solar panels for electricity for our lights and TV. I've also read some interesting work being done on biogas - seems that it is the chief energy source for many houses in India and Japan. A restaurant and some houses in the Cape have installed systems which seem to work very well. they don't seem to be too expensive to install either. So ultimately, I'm thinking that we should get a biogas system installed as it will make us independent of energy prices - but that is a pipe dream. We'll do some more research this weekend.

Enjoy the weekend.