Matric Nostalgia and a New Website

A request for a picture of our son’s first day of school came through last week. It’s his Matric farewell dance coming up in April (how did that happen?! Our son is in his final year of school already?!), so we’ve been plunged into a flood of nostalgia going through the ancient archives of pictures on our computers. Sighing and aahing (the kids too not just us!) over how cute they were, little girls in princess dresses, gap-toothed and sparkly eyed, our son dressed as a cowboy, a native American Indian, an army soldier, a pirate, round cheeked with a big smile. Of course we haven’t found a single picture of the first day of school. So he has a choice – in what role does he want to feature at his Matric dance – pirate or Indian, cowboy or army dude?

When I started this blog, coming up for ten years ago, the kids featured a lot – it was never specifically a mommy blog, but they got in on almost every post. Then at some point I felt that it was time to step back a bit and leave them out of the spotlight. The focus shifted to farm life and food, and always our festivals. But I don’t regret a word of those early posts documenting them as small kids – it’s my photo album, my journal, a place where all those funny moments and sayings have been preserved…in lieu of that proper photo album, which I’m always meaning to put together, but haven’t yet achieved.

That nostalgia for past cuteness is a strange thing. I wouldn’t for a minute turn the clock back, as that would mean turning my back on the amazing, interesting individuals they’ve grown into as teenagers, but it’s hard not to feel a little sad that all those baby and little kid days are behind us. Now I know why moms start agitating for grandchildren the minute their kids leave home! Anyway right now we’re in full on teenage mode ever since Youngest turned 13 last year and we went shopping for her first high heels for the Grade 7 farewell. Middle Daughter pointed out that her younger sister got high heels before she did, which didn’t seem right, so she compensated by getting the silveriest strappy high heels possible for the school’s Valentine’s dance. But enough, I said I'd taken the spotlight off them and it’s starting to reflect back in a myriad of highlights from glitter and sparkling nail polish.

My blog has become rather thin on the ground lately, I know. Is anyone still reading this? Anyone? I know Marcheline will stop by sooner or later, and my Mum, but quite understand if everyone else is off reading someone who actually posts more frequently! The reason/excuse is that I’ve been writing so much more for work as a freelance writer over the last couple of years that the last thing I feel like doing on weekends is sitting back down at the computer again.

I’ve been a regular contributor to Neighbourhood, a lifestyle and property supplement in South Africa’s Sunday Times, since it started up in July last year. I’m writing about food: restaurants, cafes, artisan bakeries, chocolate, anything and everything to do with food in the Cape Town area and it’s been great. Sometimes I get to review fine dining restaurants, other times it’s a new deli or café. And then there are interviews with all sorts of new businesses that aren’t food related, or spotlights on a suburb of Cape Town, chatting to residents about what it’s like to live there. I fully intended to write up separate blog posts here to share the experiences… but that’s up there in the realistic stakes with my plan to create a family photo album. But here's the news: my husband has built me a new website as a portfolio for my writing work, and I’ve got a Facebook page to go with it.

So if there’s nothing new to read here, and you feel like a glimpse of the Cape Town food scene, head over there. Or if it's the farm and family life that you want more of why not go back into my archives and share the retrospective mood that I've been indulging in.

I’ve just been re-reading my blog posts from 2006 (getting diverted from writing this post by all those vivid memories brought back from ten years ago) and I’m feeling slightly damp-eyed and nostalgic all over again. For my kids and all those little details that I would have forgotten if I hadn’t blogged them; for the early days of blogging when it was a whole community thing, when I made new friends, and we commented on each others blogs regularly, some of those friends I’m still in touch with today, some still blogging, others just on Facebook; and for those crazy days of being a full time mother with three small kids.

So a shout out to all those early bloggers of 2006 and to others who started a year or two later like Marcheline of Mental Meatloaf, and who are running with the baton in the true spirit of blogging now that some of us oldies are flagging. And a special mention to Corey of Tongue in Cheek, who started blogging just before I did and who has posted EVERY SINGLE DAY for the last 10 or more years, delighting followers with French brocante, gorgeous pictures and stories of family life in France. I wouldn't be doing what I do today if it hadn't been for my blog and I'd have missed out on knowing some lovely people! I feel like starting a retro blog meme all of a sudden, any takers?!

Seapoint Research Trip with Chocolate

Serendipity on a plate at My Sugar

There are two sorts of days when you write for a living. The ones where you sit at your computer all day, um, writing...  plus the ones where the entire day goes by at your computer not actually writing anything publishable, (make that three sorts), but sending out endless emails to people that you need information or images from with  frequent lapses onto Facebook just to distract you from the fact that not a single word has been written, apart from all those email words which don’t count towards your word count.

And then there are, very occasionally, days like today. Golden days. Days that start out with one plan and end up serendipitously turning into something else. Today we had a client meeting in town at 10, which I planned on following up with a quick drive around Seapoint in Cape Town, to research background for an article that has a looming deadline. So I dressed for a casual meeting,one step up from my work at home winter uniform of jeans and fleece jacket, and headed out with my husband (we work as a team for our web clients) into a sunny but very windy winter day driving along the N7 to town, long views of Table Mountain all the way.

Then just as we hit the N1 he gets a call to cancel the meeting, one partner called away the other one keeping the business going single handed, can we postpone?

So suddenly the whole morning lies ahead of us and all of Seapoint to research. Our first port of call is a little cafe called My Sugar that opened recently and that I will review for another article later on. I’d originally planned on just a quick look in today, but now with no meeting and Patrick desperate for coffee, we grab a table and I settle in to tasting... chocolates. Yes my best... and if ten o’clock in the morning ought to be too early who cares, chocolate is always chocolate and this is the real deal. I’m not going to review it here yet because I need to save the drum rolls for my print article, but suffice to say that if you love good chocolate and good coffee, you have to go there and taste for yourself.

Two perfect chocolates on a plate at My Sugar

Back to the car and ready to go exploring we find ourselves in the road a friend now lives in. On the off-chance we phone to see if she’s around, to find her kicking her heels at home between the arrival of various electricians and window fitters, with plenty of time to chat. A cup of tea and catch up are followed by a personalized guided tour of the back streets of Seapoint, gathering way more detail and local gossip than will ever fit into my article but so much more interesting with a life-long local to show you around than to go researching on your own.

We headed up to the heights of Fresnaye where huge houses are worth multiple millions (R60 million for some), and where stunning views out over the ocean or up behind at the mountain are enjoyed by security watchmen and builders, while absent foreign owners are off enjoying somewhere else’s sunshine. Then we descended to lower levels where the air is less rarefied and more suitable for mere mortals to breathe, muddled along Main Road, pottered along the promenade and went to gaze at the lone swimmer doing lengths in the Pavilion swimming pool, where the temperature was advertised at 13C today, one degree warmer than the ocean. Everyone I'd previously spoken to about Seapoint had told me that it’s got the best weather and is much less windy than the City Bowl. Well today was the day that proved the exception to the rule. The wind was blowing in earnest, palm trees having a bad hair day, but the sun was shining and those veteran die-hard swimmers aren’t deterred by such considerations as comfort.

Seapoint Pavilion - salt water pools with the ocean behind

By then after so much leisurely and pleasurable dawdling, school pick up time was nagging at our thoughts. Far from our West Coast stomping grounds with dog food to buy, petrol to put in and three kids to collect, we relinquished the urban vibe, calculated that our whole farm with four houses on it would probably not even buy us a two bedroom flat here and pointed the car to Melkbos.

And as this was a day of being a food writer and food trucks are one of the current Cape Town food happenings not to be ignored, we patronised our I love Melkies food truck for the first time for a late lunch (I was slightly jittery on caffeine and chocolate by this time) and had a very enjoyable toasted bagel with scrambled egg and red onion for me and a real proper hot dog for him with red onion, gherkins and sweet chilli sauce. Definitely a good street food experience to be repeated.

I Love Melkies food truck in Melkbosstrand

Now I’ve got enough notes to write my Seapoint article, an almost written review and a whole blog post out of my day, I feel energised and well fed both physically and mentally, and it was great having my husband along for the adventure too, all thanks to the postponed client meeting. Here's to many more research trips with him along as driver and co-ordinator!

Balance

I've been stuggling to balance my life recently. My clear three hours work slot in the mornings, isn't really enough, when I get a client with a big proofreading and editing job and a deadline of yesterday.

My blog has been an abandoned space recently, with a crazy week last week of trying to get ahead with my work blog, prepare the house for my parents' arrival on the Thursday, think ahead to Youngest's birthday the next day and make enough time to spend with them all.

Charlotte's post came to mind, when the very evening of their arrival, I got an urgent e-mail from a potential client with an e-book that needed editing …preferably yesterday. I put aside Saturday to do it in, relying on my parents to keep the children entertained and vice versa.

Friday was the birthday - sacrosanct, devoted to presents and baking cheese biscuits for the party, picking strawberries for the birthday cake and oops! thinking up a treasure hunt. Middle daughter's birthday had been a triumph of inspiration and planning, at least in retrospect. Youngest's was a case of last minute winging it.

We had to go and sign some papers in our local town, just before the party and, all the way in and back, I was mulling over stories for the treasure hunt, working out possible clues, hoping for inspiration - it duly arrived, enough at least to keep a five year old happy, and I ran about like a mad thing on my return, fifteen minutes before the guests were due to arrive, to put the clues round and hide the treasure.

On Saturday with my dedicated in-house baby sitting service, I managed to spend seven clear hours at the computer and finished the editing and proofreading of the e-book, setting aside Monday morning for any revisions. Sunday I kept myself away from the dreaded machine, except to decorate my poor sad blog with some strawberries to cheer it up.

Monday was when my precarious balance toppled. The e-book had come to me in multiple files and now needed formatting, plus there were some more separate files to edit. I was enjoying the project, (a really useful book on breastfeeding) and liked the clients, so wanted to do my best for them.

But computer time is completely intellectual, your physical body gets no recognition. By the end of the day, when I had taken just a lunch break and a tea break, (after having forgotten about picking the kids up from school and having to phone up to say I'd be late), I was chilled to the bone. All my energy had been focussed and directed into my computer. I was irritable and snapping, muttering savagely under my breath, when an email wouldn't send, a veritable prima donna at her first performance!

I'd done the work, but had had to abandon all the other parts of my daily routine, the physical things, the nurturing things, the emotional and spiritual things. It amazed me how physically wiped out I was, it was like I'd had a fever - my head ached, my digestion had shut down! I went to bed with a hot water bottle and my winter pyjamas.

So now I need to find ways of balancing crazy deadlines with home life and being realistic about how much work I can do in a day. The trouble is I enjoy the work, I was feeding on the buzz of getting it done and creating a pleasing, integrated book from a jumble of differently formatted files.

Anyway today, I enjoyed sauntering over to my sister-in-laws house to do the laundry, looked at the flowers, tasted some ripe mulberries from her tree, edited some copy for another client, set some bread dough to rise, wrote a bit, sat with youngest as she had her snack ..that is balanced. Hopefully I'm learning to pace myself. Any tips on keeping your sanity and your family intact under pressure of deadlines are gladly welcomed!

P.S. I think under the circumstances I'll give NaBloPoMo a miss this year, no need to add more deadline pressure to my fledgling professional balance!

Fevered Words

How many words are there in me? I'm challenging myself to find out at the moment. I know that there have been too few words left over to flow onto my own blog this week. They're all being diverted at source and filling up other pages.

I've just started a writing job for a new food web site. They want a blog post a day and an article every week, so I'm just trying to get into a regular flow for that. The site's not live yet but I'll give you a link to it once it is.

I've also started another blog on Just the Planet, a luxury travel web site that launched recently. It's full of all sorts of gorgeous places that I can only dream of visiting. My blog there is about the years I worked in Italy and my food memories of picnics and gourmet dinners and is called Pecorino and Pears. I haven't got very far into the story yet, but do come by and visit.

With my first foray into freelancing in full flow, I got brought down by the flu this week. At least it was a fever that had me shivering and clutching hot water bottles on an extremely warm spring day, when the girls were demanding to be taken swimming. Having taken them swimming I retired to the sofa for the rest of the day, downing tools and losing myself in a Georgette Heyer, the perfect panacea for all ills.

The girls were great. Having established that I was out for the count, they just got on and played together for the whole afternoon. The next day I had planned to take them out for a holiday treat, while their brother was at his cricket course, but I was still too weak and feeble, super-glued to the sofa. They bore the disappointment well and enacted innumerable four act dramas with their toy animals, middle daughter helping youngest with making sandwiches at snack time, as I dozed through the sound track of their play. I slept through lunch time with never a complaint from them, when usually they tell me they're hungry about twenty times a day.

I'm much better now. Having disposed of a Katie Fforde yesterday and used up my reserve stock of blog posts, I got back to work on the computer today, under the guise of resting. My husband was the one who had to go and attend the 'prize-giving' of our son's holiday cricket course and then he took all of the children to see Ratatouille. They came back full of it, so now we need to add it to our DVD collection. They are so used to watching things on video or DVD that they expect to be able to re-watch everything about a hundred times, until they know it by heart.

A Cluttered Mind

Two things resonated with me from this post of Charlotte's. The first that she finds it hard to ask for help and expects herself to be able to go it alone and the second the eternal housework dilemma. How, if you're not very good at housework yourself, to train your kids at least to have some idea of keeping the house moderately liveable in?

The asking for help thing is also a big hurdle for me. I always assume that everyone else has enough on their plate already and that the least I can do is sort out my relatively-unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things troubles without bothering them. So a retreat into a non-communicative comfort zone with general anaesthesia of a nice, undemanding book until I feel better, is my usual response to stress. The current interruption of blog posting, probably reflects my current struggle with the transition from cosy cocoon of stay at home mother, where I'm comfortable and confident in my abilities to bake bread, sew funny things out of felt and kiss things better, to the economic demand that I find my feet again in the strange and scary working world. I'm trying to straddle the two by working from home but it's a slow process building up a freelance business from scratch and it needs a lot of self-confidence to go out there and market yourself. I'm trying to be philosophical and read it as the universe using economic necessity as a kick up the b*m, to make me shift out of a comfort zone and stretch previously unsuspected muscles. Sometimes the philosophy slips though and chocolate and a Katie Fforde are the best recourse.

I love Katie Fforde not least because her blurb claims that her hobbies are ironing and housework but unfortunately she is too busy keeping up with the sitcoms to indulge in them. Her heroines are usually balm to the reluctant housewife, cheerfully untidy and chaotic, which makes me think that she is like that too - we're best friends already.

The divide between the untidy and the very tidy isn't quite so polemical in the blog world as, say, the hectic daycare debate that springs up and ruffles feathers at regular intervals, but there does seem to be quite a bit of sympathetic bonding between fellow messy mavericks, with bewildered incomprehension of the opposite camp.

The joys of house work haven't yet claimed me. I'm one of the clan proud to proclaim that a messy house is a sign of creativity and yet there is always a slightly defensive note to the fanfare. However much I know that I feel more comfortable when the house is looking a bit rumpled, hate it when the book I'm reading gets tidied away and can only find a jumper if it's just where I left it, I still feel that I should be tidier and teach my children to be too. This usually results in a rush of ineffectual clearing up, getting irritated with the kids when my handiwork gets rendered nul and void by another layer of played with detritus, then a surrender to the force majeure of chaos, until the next time my Virgo sun sign asserts itself.

One of Charlotte's commenters suggested a helpful site for the housework-challenged. I visited and perused its pages thinking that maybe I could do some of this, until I read the section of basics which included detailed instructions on how to achieve a shiny sink, involving soaking it in bleach, rinsing it extremely well and ever after drying it tenderly with a cloth after every use...aaaaagh! If I ever invested that much effort in a shiny sink I would be held hostage to it, standing guard over it day and night to ensure that everyone who came near gave it the same TLC. Gone would be the days when the kids could wash their sand-encrusted hands/toys/plates in it and get away with a minor request to use a bucket next time. My fleeting interest in gaining brownie points and becoming a better housewife was abruptly curtailed as I realised the devastating effect it could have on family life. Another of Charlotte's commenters remembered her mother's passion for keeping a clean house and how the children always used go next door to play. I jumped firmly back on to the messy = friendly house bench.

I've settled for decluttering as a means to improve the surface visibility in our house. Decluttering seems to be the Feng Shui of the moment. Getting rid of the excess stuff that is why your house is so untidy in the first place, and trying to change the mentality that makes you hang on to things that you don't use any more, makes more sense to me than spending hours cleaning, only to have it look exactly the same minutes after three kids and four dogs explode into the house. At least decluttering seems to last for a few days.

A mouse visitor in the larder inspired me to try the method. Our larder was getting harder to get into as the pile of stuff at the far end was making a bid to take over the entrance. The counter was overflowing with half used packets of this and that and boxes of empty jam jars filled the storage space. A few hours spent being ruthless on the weekend and I have a gleamingly clear counter space, can see the floor and there is even room for the cats to get in and catch that darned mouse...unfortunately the hall is now cluttered with the excess boxes of jam jars, which I still intend to keep for jam-making in strawberry season, and more boxes destined for the garage with all the recycling..!

Now whenever I need a morale boost I can go and stand at the door to the larder and admire its orderliness, and as long as I keep my back to the hall my halo glows brightly.

All Passion Spent!

Passion fruit husks

Today I spent the bulk of my computer time sending out my articles to article sites - a laborious and repetitive task, that is eventually rewarded by increased amounts of links out there in cyberspace, beckoning people and search engines to our websites and boosting their page rankings. Basically you attach your author biography to the article with a link to your website in it and anybody can use the article for their sites for free as long as those links go with it. Your writing isn’t repaid in monetary terms but in the increased visibility of your site.

As I stood over the stove this evening, head thick with a cold, desultorily stirring some chicken and carrots into a stir fry, again, because I couldn’t think of anything more inspiring that the children would eat, I pondered the wording of my article biography that I’d been mechanically pasting onto all those articles: ”..and is passionate about food.” If only they could see me now! I’d never felt less passionate about food. I thought enviously of those real food blogs like CookSister, where they experiment with new flavours, revel in their cooking and photograph it attractively before tucking in. Years of feeding children have dulled the edge of that passion, at least that’s how it feels on a coldy, autumnal evening. Shopping once a week at a supermarket doesn’t quite compare with browsing a market in France or Italy for seasonal specialities and how I wish I could sample the temptations of London’s Borough Market with a bottomless purse and no kids in tow!

Having had that little grumble, let it be said that I now do a mean Sunday Roast and the smell of new bread from the kitchen is pretty enticing right now, even from the depths of these culinary doldrums. Plus I take heart from the archives of my family history books. Apparently my brother and I were taken across the Channel to France for a summer holiday in Brittany, aged about 3 and 5. We refused all foreign food provided by the hotel, including the roast beef that was usually our favourite at home, because French Roast Beef wasn’t the same as English Roast Beef....

Alternative Reality

Last week just as I was in the middle of baking a batch of fairy cakes for yet another class cake sale, two eager helpers at the buttons of the Magimix (yes I cheat, but this method is condoned, nay recommended, by the divine Nigella) the phone inevitably rang and catapulted me into a frenzy of activity that resulted in rather well tanned fairy cakes.

The company that I used to work for before I had children, taking people on holidays in Italy, had tracked me down through my mother. They had a new trip about to start here in South Africa, their Tour Leader who was already out here preparing for the trip had had to fly home as her father was dying, and could I help.

So it was that I found myself, after a flurry of phone calls, driving to the airport in my scruffy car to meet the local guide, who was now taking the leader’s place, and welcome the group, trying to access the remnants of my once ultra efficient Tour Manager personality and quell the pre-trip butterflies in my stomach. They’re like stage fright and I always used to suffer from them, even when I was seamlessly running trips all summer. Meeting a new group of people... that important first impression, what will they be like?

It all did go smoothly. We drove to the stunning hotel – Cape Dutch wine estate with a backdrop of mountains and had a wonderful lunch, a grown-up lunch with conversation and wine, that I hadn’t cooked myself, in beautiful surroundings. After lunch I went with my new colleague, who is staying with the group, to her room to go over our plans. Relaxed on pristine bedspread in a tidy room with no clutter, a sparkling bathroom, giving on to a private terrace, on a lawn beyond which a helicopter reposed. Imagined staying with the group, going from nice hotel to nicer hotel, eating in good restaurants, sampling different wines, returning to my pre-children days of two parallel realities.

Then I waved goodbye, got back in my scruffy car and drove out of the bubble which faded to unreality as I neared home and popped completely as I walked into our weekend messy house, where my son was groaning on a sofa, having had an allergic reaction to a bee sting, supper needed cooking as we expected a guest and I felt at home.

Then it came upon me that working for a holiday company, a good one at least, is all about creating bubbles – beautiful, bright, seamless bubbles, for your clients to dwell in, buffered from the demands of life and decision making. A little bit of human magic. You just have to make sure you don’t get dazzled by your own spell-making and spend too long inside the bubble yourself, for real life is outside the bubble in the imperfections and gritty bits, in the silver linings of unlooked for clouds, wax crayons crunching underfoot and senile dogs barking, but also children smiling, presenting you with obscure presents constructed of glue and paper, people who belong to you for life, not just until the bubble bursts at the airport’s end.

I’ll be spending some time from home helping keep the bubble intact, then have another couple of forays into the world of gourmet restaurants and five star hotels to make sure everyone is happy, but I’ll be sleeping at home and that's how I like it.

Whirlwind Weeks

The last few weeks have been fairly hectic and I haven't been keeping up with my real life on my blog. There are about ten million things (exaggeration? maybe slightly but it doesn't feel like it!) that I haven't had time to write about coherently - and I don't know where to start. Maybe you'll let me off with just one sentence per thing, in note form, before I have to go and bake for my mother-in-law's 85th birthday lunch tomorrow..we're down to 45 people expected, including the children.

The property development saga: rezoning hasn't been passed for our municipality yet, so nothing will happen for six months or so, but we are dreaming of finding a beautiful farm in a new area further away from Cape Town.

Teaching: any teachers out there, you have my unmitigated respect. After a couple of weeks, just helping out taking a few lessons, I'm feeling not a little frazzled, frequently invisible and wondering how all those real teachers do it!
Two of our school's six teachers, who are Canadian and here from the goodness of their hearts to give expertise, skills, training and plain wonderful teaching to our little school and its children, had their visa renewal denied on a technicality and have spent the last few weeks appealing - this meant that they were not allowed to set foot on school premises under threat of deportation and the remaining teachers have been stretched to the limit, hence my unskilled help being in demand. We heard yesterday that they have now got their permit so will be back at school on Monday - a huge sigh of relief all round..my son included who is missing his teacher. SA Home Affairs department has got a long way to go on attracting skilled people to South Africa.

Oscars: No I didn't get the maths teacher role in the commercial that I casted for, but I was the Director's first choice, apparently the casting director disagreed, couldn't really see myself at the Oscars anyway!

I'm doing all day Sunday workshops with our friend numerologist, art therapist and psychic, learning about her various therapy and healing tools - there is a great group of women on the course and we are all having to go through the therapy to learn it, so it is very intense.
It also means that I find myself back at Monday again, without having had any weekend chill time, as my husband has long Saturday meetings for his work at the moment - we're waving at each other like ships passing in the night.

Kindergarten: I took youngest along to kindergarten this week, for one day and stayed there the whole morning with her. She was very pleased with herself for making some new friends of her own, but not quite confident enough spend time there without me the next day. I'm going to have another go after next week, when things have settled down a bit more at the new kindergarten building.

P.S. Apologies to all of you with Wordpress blogs, I can't comment at the moment so all my words and witticisms are disappearing into a black hole in the Web - I'm still reading and enjoying your posts though, consider me there in spirit.
P.P.S. Charlotte very kindly nominated me in the South African Blog Awards, so I've put a widget on my sidebar - they only have begging "Nominate Me" ones available - I'll look out for "Vote for Me" ones later! Charlotte, I've returned the favour and nominated you for the South African Overseas blog too.

x + y = ?

The universe is trying to tell me something. Employment opportunities have been throwing themselves at me out of the blue. For the last seven years my instinctive reaction to such phenomena would have been to duck. I was quite busy enough at home bringing up young children and that is where I wanted to be thank you very much. This time round I’m having to rethink and catch the balls thrown at me, rather than dodge them. Apart from the fact that youngest is now four and should soon be leaving me more time to rediscover where I am going in life, we need a second income stream, even if only a small top up one.

All last year I was trying to think of something that would fit in with school times and allow me to work part-time or from home. I’d got as far as contacting publishing houses for proof-reading work, though nothing has come through yet, writing to support my husband’s websites, which is how my blog was born (with far greater and wider application and bonusses than I’d dreamt of, I agree with all that Charlotte said here) but though it was all enriching, widening my horizons and I’m so glad I did, just for meeting all you wonderful friends, from the financial point of view apart from the $2 or so I’d earned from Adsense, it wasn’t getting me very far.

A possibility, that had never crossed my mind, came when we had our cinema outing last week. After the movie, we had lunch in a coffee shop that opened into the mall. A friendly girl approached me and asked if I’d be interested in casting for a commercial. Loads of film companies use Cape Town for shoots, and this Norwegian director wanted ‘natural’, so was casting people off the street. Initially I assumed she meant the children and said “No”, as I don’t want them to have to cope with the whole palaver of shoots, when they’re all quite shy of strangers. My sister-in-law, mentioned the money though and I thought about it under this new light. We went back to her and it turned out to be me they wanted to do the casting, there was apparently a ‘role’ the director thought I’d be perfect for. So she took a snap of me with a number, handed me the info letter and I went off to do the shopping.

My husband looked at the letter and recognised the production company as one who uses their studio for castings...so if I was called, it would most likely be to his workplace.

Fast forward to this week. I did get called, it was to his studio (handy for on site creche facilities in the form of Dad, if it hadn’t been far too hot to drag them all the way in to town). After all the usual hanging around that castings involve, I went in. Stood in front of the camera for the test shots. Was asked to do a little action.Turns out the role that the director thought I’d be perfect for is......a maths teacher! When the day before I’ve also been asked to become a real teacher, I think this is some sort of cosmic gentle tease, either that or a bludgeoning over the head of “Get on with it THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING!”

I don’t know whether they want me for the teacher role in the commercial yet, I hope so, it would be fun and one day of those sort of jobs a month would bring in more than the teaching would do. I somehow don’t think my destiny involves an acting career though – I’m being shoved from being a SAHM to being a GTSWTKM (go to school with the kids mother) ..unless I’m reading it wrong and you’ll see me at the Oscars in ten years time!

Musical Hats

With all these different Hats to don, today has gone by in a blur of metaphorical millinery.

I started off in Kindergarten Hat. The morning was not quite a smooth as yesterday. The day’s grace accorded guest teachers had been used up and the boys decided to test boundaries a little – just the odd surreptitious bounce off the walls and each other to see what I would do. Holding them all in my consciousness felt more like being pregnant with twins busy kicking and elbowing at the walls of the womb.

The main feature of outside play was a snail race, with the construction of an elaborate track of bark and some slices of log as the winners circle. Much pushing and prodding, lifting up and redirecting was necessary to cajole the snails into competing.

Home to a brief respite in ordinary Mum Hat before putting on Photographer Hat at a jaunty digital angle to resize and fit into a template all the school photos that I took last week. We had a false start with Fireworks on the weekend and had to redo the template in Photoshop to get a better resolution for printing. I did one class of 19 before my bottom became numb and I got up to find it was past four o'clock already.

I flung away that Hat and reached for the billowy, floury Baker number. I’d baked yesterday but we seem to have eaten all three loaves already, so to avert a crisis tomorrow morning it had to be done. Once a batch of Rye Bread was rising I glanced across at the yawningly empty biscuit tin – in for a penny, in for a pound – might as well do a batch of biscuits while I’m at it. Then some dough for pizza for supper, I think this hat must have some extra energy tabs in it. All this to then collapse in a heap, only to remember the NaBloPoMo monster. With no lyrical prose on the go there was nothing for it but to catalogue my day of musical hats, except... bother... I never got round to giving Numerology Hat a twirl today.

Kindergarten Hat

Something out there in the universe has decreed that I shall try on numerous unaccustomed hats recently. I’m being eased out of my full time mother role and forced to take a look at the big wide world outside. Not all that far outside really, no further than my children’s schools. I wasn’t proactive about any of these experiences, in fact I hung back, looking round to see if any one else would volunteer first. When they didn’t I took a deep breath and stepped forward to accept the profferred hat.

In the last week I’ve tried on School Photographer Hat, Numerology Hat and today Kindergarten Teacher Hat. Our teacher at the little Waldorf kindergarten here had to be away for a few days this week. It was a choice between no school, or me taking school.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe the kids would take one look at me and riot, realising that I wasn’t the genuine teacher article? Would I get in trouble with them for doing things ‘wrong’? In fact it all went fairly smoothly. They are so accustomed to the rhythm of their mornings that when it is time to tidy up after craft, drawing and free play, all it took was for one of them to start singing the ‘tidy gnome’ song and they all gradually joined in the tidying and in ten minutes the whole place looked spick and span. Now why doesn’t that work at home?

After an optional procession to the toilet it was Ring Time. The allotted task was practising Christmas carols for their end of term ‘play’. A few more rounds of some ring games ensued, then it was time to take snacks outside for a picnic. This is inspired on the teacher’s part, as it saves yet another tidy up of crumbs and spilt juice inside, and runs seamlessly into outside play time.
The girls spent at least three-quarters of an hour working hard to demolish a huge log, picking off great chunks of ‘gold’ with the trowels and observing the scurry of ants and beetles as their hiding place was revealed. A couple of the boys took over the watering from me and mostly managed to water the plants rather than each other. The slide proved irresistable in conjunction with the hose though!

I was sitting there thinking that this was a complete doddle, but then reflected that this was mostly due to the teacher’s hard work initially to get all the routines established. By the end I suddenly felt quite tired, not from any great physical or mental exertions but from the constant holding all the children in my consciousness, just being aware of them all the time. It requires a different sort of energy to be a kindergarten teacher, similar to that of a mother of young children, except that for the span of a morning without any other claims on your attention, you can be the perfect mother, patient and and gentle, using humour to deflect tantrums or squabbles. The only problem seems to be that by the time I got home I found that I had used up all my reserves of those qualities for the day, so the kids had short shrift thereafter.

I’ve got another two days of it, which I will enjoy, but I don’t think I’d want to take it on long term. The pace and feel of it is the same as the mother space that I’m just emerging from, trying to get my brain back up to speed in the adult world. Kindergarten would be lulling me back into dream time again. I might wake up to find a hundred years had passed by!

Faking It

Today I tentatively tried on a new hat - School Photographer for the day. I had a hard act to follow - my husband did the photos at our son's school last year and as a professional photographer set a standard way beyond normal school photo levels. Unfortunately the whole job took up quite a lot of time, not the taking of the photos but the digital resizing, compiling and printing of the photos afterwards. Being a perfectionist he also retouched all the incipient teenage acne and blemishes, effectively providing them with a studio portrait.

So this year, with him being too busy, they asked me. I'm technically fairly competant with a camera, knowing my apertures and depths of field and stuff, and have the benefit of access to a decent camera, excellent advice and a kind of absorption by osmosis of photographic techniques, but I suffered a degree of anxiety about the other part of the job. There is more to people photography than exposing correctly and clicking the shutter release. What my husband is so good at is getting a rapport going with the subject, relaxing them and so getting a natural smile rather than a plastered on mask of a grimace. Not to mention the organising of a hundred people into a whole school group shot.

So feeling a little apprehensive I hustled us all out of the house in good time, dropped off the strawberries to sell at the farm stall, my six year old at the kindergarten and met my kind husband at the school, where he was going to help me set up. He checked the cameras for me, took a few trial shots and with a reassuring "You'll be fine" left me to it. In the end it was fine. He'd chosen the right outside spot with a background of dappled sunshine on leaves, with the subject in shade, set the camera for fill in flash to soften the shadows, so all I was left to do was to coax an approximation of a smile out of each child. Some of them looked like I was torturing them, then would smile beautifully just when the camera flash was recharging.

I had youngest along with me. She spent most of the time sitting under the tripod, only occasionally saying she wanted to go home. When we did get home I immediately downloaded the whole lot with trepidation. Would there be a usable photo for each child? There was. Maybe room for improvement to reach my husband's high standards, but good enough and as I am no perfectionist myself that will be good enough. Now all I have to do is crop, resize, fit into a template and print eighty or so portraits and class photos. Luckily my husband is also an expert on the necessary computer skills so I'll be learning fast over the weekend.

Frolicking in the Daisies

We had a perfect spring day yesterday and the daisies agreed. They're not at their thickest yet, next week our farm will be carpeted in white, but enough to start trying to capture this year's 'children in the daisies' pictures. Every year I have a bash at getting the elusive perfect shot and am frequently foiled by the bright contrasty sunlight (which is what makes the daisies unfurl their petals) and the glare from all these white flowers. The kids are usually squinting in the brightness, with dark shadows thrown by their hats on their faces. I'm aiming for an album with a page for each year, full of our children frolicking in the flowers, growing up in the daisies.

This year we had an ulterior motive too. We're setting up a photo library on our A Flower Gallery site, where you can download photos for a small fee, hence the letters on this pic. I've been learning, more than I ever thought I would, about Photoshop - resizing, retouching, adding letters to the sample photos so that they can't be used so easily without permission, and staring at my computer screen, instead of the enticing view through the window, to the daisies and mountains.

The kids were cooperative models for a short time, but as it got closer to lunch time patience wore thin, and the appropriate captions for the resulting pictures were more likely to be 'Stomping off in a grump through the daisies'.

We had decided on a policy of using only the generic pictures of them for the library, not portraits where they are easily recognizable. So trying to get pictures of them walking away through the flowers hand-in-hand was the aim...and we did get some...but how eloquent backs can be! Some of the shots clearly say, 'my Mum made me do this and I actually want to go and pick up pine cones over there and now I think about it I'm hungry'. Still there's always next week.

My Mug Shot

Here's my contribution to the mug shot meme, from Meredith at Found in France.

This mug is from Montalcino in Tuscany, now weathered, slightly chipped - the soft maiolica ceramic they use doesn't stand up to children very well, or continuous use generally. This is the sole survivor of several individual mugs that I used to bring home at the end of every season working in Italy, organising walking holidays and best of all, the food. There were several towns noted for their ceramics and I had small espresso mugs from Orvieto and Siena, but there was a workshop in Montalcino that did its own variations on traditional patterns and I loved the colours and swirly pattern in this one.

At the end of each season, some of us would have the task of driving the minibuses back to England...empty. Now for several months we would have been travelling light, living out of a suitcase, moving between the trips we were working on, with no base to dump excess baggage. So we used to compile mental shopping lists as we travelled and devise a route home that took in all the places where the coveted items resided. My list usually included olive oil from Montichiello, wine - Rosso di Montalcino, the Brunello was more of an investment to be put away for a few years, so I usually went for the more immediate gratification, ceramics, sometimes even a couple of enormous terracotta pots, folding clothes airers of the sort that take a whole washing machine load, designed for European flat dwellers, which weren't then available in England, shoes from Siena, the list could be endless. All these purchases we hoped would help us over the culture shock of returning to a stationary, city-bound winter existence before spring sent us driving out again to the Italian countryside for more wonderful food and wine and perpetual motion. The minibuses would then trundle north over the Alps, up the French autoroutes and onto the cross Channel ferries, groaning under the weight of our shopping sprees.

This life suited me well in my twenties but as the big 30 loomed, a more settled existence beckoned and I used to do just a couple of trips a year. The last trip I did, I had just found out I was pregnant with our son and in those early stages of pregnancy I could hardly eat a thing. Such a waste of all those wonderful 5 course meals, that I still had to sit down to with clients every night, explaining to every restaurant that the food was lovely but the connoisseur tour manager couldn't eat it because she's expecting a baby. I wish I could have sent those meals fast forwarding in to the future - now, when they would be properly appreciated!

This mug and the clothes airer and a respectable amouont of other ceramics have now made it as far as South Africa, sadly the terracotta pots stayed behind in London.

Pasta Recipe

I've been trying to write down my quick and easy pasta with tuna recipe today for the website we are building. Discovered it takes far longer to write it than to cook it. All I usually do is put water on to boil for the pasta. Chop some garlic and ginger and saute in olive oil very gently, chuck in the tuna and some herbs, salt and pepper then toss with the cooked pasta. The trouble comes when I try to give exact quantities and allow for different possibilities such as adding some fresh tomato etc. My own made up recipes don't tend to be very exact, come out different each time I make them which is half the fun - variety being the spice of life and all that.

A major change in my life - my youngest has just started kindergarten, aged 3 and a half, so suddenly I have the mornings free for undisturbed work. A huge mental shift, accompanied by bursts of nostalgia for the days of babies and toddlers. Part of the challenge is ignoring the housework, which can be done with the children around in the afternoon, and sitting down at the computer for long stretches of time - sitting down to anything for any length of time is fairly foreign to a full-time mother - time to readjust to the ways of the working world. She is loving it, so far, in the same class as her big sister, she knows most of the children already and has been itching to get her hands on the toys for months.

A rhyme I heard which sums up our household:

Cleaning a house,
where children are growing
is like shovelling snow
while it is still snowing