I don’t know about you and what happens in your house, but in my house we all have different skills sets.   Gerhard is responsible for holidays, booking, paying and actually getting us there.   I pack, clothes for flying holidays, clothes and food and medical supplies for self-drive holidays.   I buy groceries and direct Sekai what to cook when, Gerhard does a mean braai and he makes delicious curry and pasta.   I tend to do most of the shopping in the house, Gerhard has to buy cars.   You catch my drift. For my sins I seem to be responsible for IT…please note that I do not possess any specific IT skills.   For some reason I just seem less afraid of embracing technology.   As a working mother I don’t have a lot of free time.   Weekends are for shopping (groceries and clothes for the kids mostly).   This past weekend was spent setting up Liam’s Xbox.   The poor kid saved up forever to buy a new Xbox.   Gerhard had to work on ...

Dear A team parent I am writing to you today to tell you that I am ok, my husband is ok and my B team kid is doing fine too.   We are happy, the kids are enjoying whatever activity we they are participating in today.   All in all, all is well with the world. We get up, we have breakfast, we drop the kids at school, we go to work, we get home when the sun has already set.   We chat, we have dinner, we talk about our days, the highs and the lows, we go to bed and tomorrow we do it all again. I don’t know where some of you get the energy to spend your daylight hours at school.   It must be exhausting trying to hold down a meaningful job, raise happy well balanced kids, geared for the challenges that they will face and to still spend an inordinate amount of time at school?   You must never sleep, I admire you, hats off.   You are truly super human beings.   I get tired just looking at the sheer volume of WhatsApp’s you manage to fire off in a ...

I have been taken hostage and there is absolutely nothing that you can do to help me.  It has been one thousand two hundred and seventy one days and sixty seconds and I fear for my sanity and my life.  Money won't free me.  I need to stick this out for another couple of years before I will escape.  Only time served will free me.  Come to think of it, it is more like prison!  I have of course been added to class and sport WhatsApp groups by people that meant well at the start.  Bearing in mind that my kids are in a decent (and rather expensive) private school, the level of questioning never ceases to amaze me and I mostly find myself sitting on my hands to not respond to the daily stream of questions.  Each child has a homework book, and the new mom's in Grade 1 are the worst.  it is not as if any child will fail Grade 1 if we get the maths wrong on the first day of school.   The school sends out a weekly newsletter with a detai...

I wrote this one in 2017, a year ago and I am only getting around to publishing it now.  Whilst a lot can change and has changed in a year, we still have  along way to go.  We went to see Johnny Clegg in his spectacular final goodbye show at Montecasino last year.  What an emotional experience.  We sometimes forget about the horrors of the apartheid era and what it must have been like in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s being a white man dressing up like a Zulu, performing his ikasi music.  The show was quite anecdotal and reflective and Johnny describes how he met Sipho, when the latter came to Johannesburg and waited outside Johnny’s parents’ flat and asked if Johnny was “Big Ears”.  You are pulled back to the dark days when black and white people were not allowed to be friends, to perform together etc. He now smiles when he tells his tales of arrest, but surely at the time nobody could have been smiling.  One of the highlights ...

It is the eve of my first ever protest about anything really.  I am a little scared, a little excited, a little apprehensive but extremely motivated.  For those not following South African politics, our President last week fired our honest Minister of Finance and the South African economy took a tumble and we were downgraded to junk status by ratings agencies. Economic and political uncertainty ensued all because of one man’s greed and corruption.  Junk status has dire implications for our country and as always the people who will be most affected are the poorest of the poor.  Interest rates will rise, so will inflation and food prices, jobs will be lost, the list of horrible things goes on. Ordinary South Africans have now had enough and for the first time ever people from all walks of life are united behind a common cause, to save South Africa.  I have never in my 40 years on this earth been moved by any cause, not enough to actually take...

I was telling Gerhard last night that I bought Kayla’s cookbook, and he burst out laughing and accused me of being a full on groupie, I was upset, really, I am almost 40 years old, how can you think that I am a groupie.  But as the evening progressed, I started to agree with him a teeny tiny bit, and I must admit, I have fallen for Kayla and the Bikini Body Guide (BBG) hook line and sinker. So for those of you living under a rock, let me explain.  Kayla Itsiness is an Australian personal trainer with more than 10 million online followers, or Kayla’s Army as they are affectionately known.  They are loyal and fierce and arrange mass meetups where they exercise Kayla style doing one of her killer BBG workouts, almost always including burpees, mountain climbers, you get the gist of it.  These are known as BBG meetups and take place globally, the ultimate goal is to attract enough attention to maybe entice Kayla herself to attend your city’s meetup.  I...

I just realised that getting older has a way of sneaking up on the best of us and that despite our best intentions to never act or look middle aged, it catches you eventually.  Case in point, where this past Friday evening was spent at a venue called “Weiveld” watching a Francois van Coke show for a fortieth birthday party.  I am of the age now where nothing perks me up faster than a Friday afternoon blow-dry before I go out on weekends.  Bliss having someone else blow-dry my hair.  To say that I have a lot of hair is like saying that Kim Kardashian has a sizeable bum.  It is a blatant understatement.  People often ask me if I have hair extensions and a trip to the hairdresser takes me longer than most.  I have lots and lots of thick hair, and it needs to be tamed with blow-dryers and other instruments of torture.  To add insult to injury, Luka has lots and lots of hair requiring instruments of torture too and it just kills me that ...

What is it about new years, new beginnings and the reflection that goes along with it? I am not one for making New Year’s resolutions, but this year as luck would have it I decided to do some things differently in the New Year.  Not resolutions, just slight tweaks to my life and lifestyle for the better, I hope.  For starters, I just went and bought myself a brand new pair of running shoes, bright orange so that people will see me and not run me over.  I decided that this is my year, I am turning forty and I want to be fabulous when that happens.  Also, Gerhard finally agreed to take me to New York this year and I want to be in good shape when that happens!  I want to be able to walk, ok, maybe trot from one glorious store to the next in my pursuit of the perfect pair of shoes.  Who am I kidding, PAIRS OF SHOES.   Gerhard and I went for a bicycle ride in the estate yesterday, we left the kids alone and unsupervised for about half...

It is school holidays again, thankfully the last day as I can really see that Liam and Luka are bored.  We asked Liam how his day was yesterday and he promptly informed us that he had not had a good day.  Some friends in the park were nasty to him and his sister irritated him when he had a friend over for the afternoon.   Last night as Liam goes off to bed we tell him to try and sleep late, we tell him tales of our own youth (like old people do) of how we used to sleep until almost noon.  Liam being an early riser tells us that he prefers to wake at 5am! This morning Gerhard and I chat about this sleeping late phenomenon and we realise that it is only once you reach your teenage years that sleeping late becomes a thing as you end up watching bad television until the early hours of the morning.  So Liam will probably carry on waking up at the crack of dawn for some time to come seeing as we send the poor kid off to bed at around 8pm without fail.  ...

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending my first Francois van Coke show. I think most people my age were still listening to Koos Kombuis, Johannes Kerkorrel and maybe some Karen Zoid as our mainstream alternative Afrikaans music not believing that anyone else had anything real to add to the struggle.  So imagine my surprise when I dragged Gerhard along to this show, and Francois van Coke and his two man band managed to rock in Afrikaans. People could never quite manage that and always sounded like they were chocking on broccoli when attempting to rock in Afrikaans. I was blown away. What struck me even more is that it seemed as if Francois van Coke in some of his many guises managed to attract diverse crowds, not bad for an Afrikaans guy right. We missed the rise of Fokofpolisiekar, probably because we were so consumed with raising our two rockers at home, and probably because Liam and Luka were at a particularly impressionable age where we did not want to even whisp...

I have previously written about my love of gadgets.  I am a proud wearer of a Fitbit and nothing makes me happier than having the device vibrate on my wrist telling me that I nailed my step goal of 10 000 steps for the day.  This was of course exasperated even further when my medical aid started giving me free smoothies for achieving weekly fitness goals.  I tell you the things that I would do for a free smoothie… So, if you ever see me and Gerhard frantically walking our dogs, not waiving, not smiling, with a Flash Gordon left arm going up and down up and down at the speed of light, you know that we are still behind on the steps.  If you see us going up and down our own staircase with the Flash arm going up and down up and down, you know we need the steps.  If you come for coffee and we stand walking on the spot whilst you are sipping on your latte, you know that we are still a tad short on the steps.  If you see me in my (heaven f...

This morning was my turn to drop Luka at school.  Liam, the self-sufficient one is still on his bicycle happily cycling to school at the crack of dawn wearing his school bomber jacket that he will hopefully grow into before going to Grade 5.  I was a little upset the day that I bought said bomber jacket, I was a tad tired and stressed about the amount of money that I spent at the little shop of horrors, also known as the Uniform Shop.  So stressed that I got a bit carried away when trying to show the shop assistant how tall Liam was and we now have a bomber jacket for a seven year old that would fit me.  The Uniform Shop.  They make it sound so innocent, but once you walk through those glass doors your credit card starts quivering and sweat gathers on your brow, because for the price of a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes you can get one bomber jacket and a single pair of grey socks. The first time I entered the shop of horrors, I almost feint...

Can one person be so excited about a prospect? We have been living in the same house for a couple of years.  After moving back from Australia I had only a handful of shoes.  OK, I tell a lie, 30 odd pairs that I held in my hands and after carefully weighing up, deemed worthy of sending across the waters at the cost of an average lung in the Ukraine.  I had some basic clothes, same story, stuff that I could fit into a couple of suitcases.  The cupboard space in the master bedroom seemed more than ample to house my (ever) growing wardrobe, a top here, and a pair of shoes there.  The couriers from the online shops here in SA mostly know me by name.  My super power is the ability to know exactly what something from an online store would look like on me, what I can pair it with, whether it would fit, a rare skill, I admit, but this took years of returns to the online stores, collected by my same courier friends.  I have a list in my head of...