And we are officially counting the days to Christmas.   Once again I am stunned at the fact that every year seemingly passes so much faster than the one before.   This is particularly evident when looking at pictures of Christmases past.   A year ago Luka was wearing nappies, drinking formula milk, taking naps, her hair was best described as a messy bob, and now she is a girl with long golden hair.   A year ago Liam swam with water wings and was petrified of the ocean, now he is a smelly boy missing one front tooth. So looking at the year past counting sleeps to our December break realising that this has once again been quite the year for the van Wyk / van Rooyen family.   We bought a house and it turned into a home, we spend weekends chilling by the pool.   Luka potty trained and turned into a pink princess, Liam made some good friends, learned to play tennis, add and subtract, finally build puzzles!   Sekai’s house in Zimbabwe is coming along nice...

Thanks John Bon Jovi, for writing this almost Justin Bieber like song that got stuck in Liam’s head, so now when he gets in the car he asks for that song, it is in actual fact called “Because we can”. Liam gets up on the backseat and gets this pained expression on his face, like someone in desperate need of the loo, and he bops his head and he sings along, every single word, and he even plays some air guitar, and Liam being Liam and in love with vests (!) and always sporting some form of a temporary tattoo, looks like the quintessential rocker… I have tried to introduce other music, but there is no hope, his playlist includes ACDC’s Thunder Struck, Money Talks, Hey Stoopid from Alice Cooper…Liam is like an old hippie rocker, he likes the classic stuff with lots of guitar and drums.   Oh, and Bad Medicine, same Bon Jovi.   Liam also recently acquired a neon belt with graffiti like words on, one being bad ass, he recons that the two of us are bad asses, like Bon Jovi. ...

When I was growing up, we all had that one Nirvana unplugged CD.  You know the one where the poor drug addict screams his little lungs out, come as you are...preferably high.  In my case I also had an Eric Clapton unplugged CD.   The first CD I ever owned in fact was the Eric Clapton one, the teary Tears in Heaven and the more upbeat Layla played extensively on my DVD player back in the day.   I don’t think that any of us really knew just what unplugged meant, or how we would in time to come need to unplug ourselves from the network a bit. This past weekend we went to a cherry farm in Fouriesburg, Free-State with some friends, and the most amazing part of the weekend was most probably the fact that our smartphones had zero reception.  Zero as in nada, zip, this meant no BBM, Whatsapp, Facebook or emails.   It was quite a new experience to be living in the moment again and not living the moment on Facebook tagging along all the ti...