Happy Easter! And we hope you enjoyed celebrating the joy and life that we have through Jesus Christ.

We didn’t get to join our friends for the big Easter egg hunt today due to sick children and parents, but Grace did get to enjoy her own egg hunt at home.

Prerequesite

Searching

Gathering

Nom nom

Hope you had a happy and blessed day!

We took out the Easter eggs and chocolates this evening, only to discover that we have an Easter mouse.

The Easter Mouse strikes!

So this means a few things,

1. We have super lazy cats who should not be given food until they present at least four mice each.
2. War on mice….eating the Easter chocolate is crossing a line.
3. Lindt chocolate gets the approval of chocolate eating mice. Nothing else was touched, only the bunnies.
4. There is going to be a hungry, chocolate craving mouse tonight.

This morning Grace made Eli a crown, all on her own. She cut the paper, stapled it, measured his head size, and then put the final staple in. A perfect fit!

A brief snapshot of this week: Sunday, Monday and Thursday Eli has woken up at around about 03h00 and been awake for an hour and a half. Grace has been off colour most of the week which developed into a serious cough, fever and snottiness. She is getting better, but still not looking too good. Fortunately she hasn’t been coughing at night. Eli has now come down with the same thing, but fortunately not as serious as Grace’s.

The reason for that snapshot is so that when everyone is healthy and our children are sleeping through the night and we’ve forgotten all about this week, we can celebrate that these things are temporary and celebrate the joy and blessing of what we have.

Ready to scrum!

Reflections in the oven

Eye of the tiger

In other random news from the day, we had a quick cup of coffee after taking Grace to the doctor (she’ll be fine) and Kobus Wiese taps me on the shoulder and says, “Gee vir daai baba ‘n tieta want hy soog aan jou nek.” (Give the baby a boob, because he’s suckling on you neck)

Grace has been looking forward to the school outing for some time now, “Are we going to SANCCOB?” And today was finally the day….but the poor noodle was feeling pretty sick today. We did go and she got to meet Rocky the Rockhopper penguin and was even able to give him a stroke (he was apparently “soft like you daddy.”). She really seemed to enjoy it (only the class went in, we had to wait outside), but was done afterwards.

To add to the fun Eli has also come down with the same cold, so we have both of them coughing with snotty noses.

Feeling run down at the end of the day

We’ve been working with Grace to get her to be more helpful with the tidying up of the house at the end of the day, and it has actually been going really well. Yesterday she was tidying up and Donné told her to come and get the skipping rope from the lounge. She walks out of her door with both hands full of things she was busy tidying up and says, “I’ve only got two hands.”

Trying on some sneakers for the first time

Grace enjoys her brother and sometimes she looks forward to him waking up from a nap. She picks up the monitor and says, “I think I can hear him through the monitor.” Donné says, “No Grace, he is still sleeping.” She listens again, “I can hear something, I think he’s awake.” This time Donné replies, “No Grace, that is just the static because the monitor is turned up.” Pause, “I think he’s awake, I can hear him.”

Grace “I’m the mommy” Drennan putting Tracy to sleep in her Moby

We spent some time over the weekend going through a box of old toys from Gogo and Gramp’s house. I remember having lots of fun racing on the “Rev ‘n Roll Raceway”. Unfortunately we seem to be missing one bike. There was also a Scaletrix track which just needs some cleaning up, board games (with THE original chess set that I learned to play on), and some awesome wooden building things (nuts, bolts, wheels, blocks) that I used to spend hours building with.

Trying out those little legs

All aboard the family train!

Grace got a bee in her bonnet that she wanted to post a letter this afternoon, so she did some drawing, put it in an envelope and wanted to walk to the post box. The child who just this morning was constantly “too tired to walk” when we went to have a cup of coffee with Keren now wanted to take a 15 minute walk to post a letter. So after making it clear that I would not be carrying her (I had Eli in the Moby) off we went. Not a peep or a parp about being tired, just a little girl happy to be posting a letter.

On the way back Grace was asking about gates and walls and I said to her that lots of people have walls and gates because we have a problem with people stealing things in South Africa. We walk on a little while and then she says, “Daddy, what’s the problem with South Africa?”

Having some silly fun with my children

Grace watched a movie for the first time today, and the movie was…..wait for it….drum roll…..Beauty and the Beast! It was interesting to be with her and help her process the different parts of the movie. The tense parts, or parts with strong emotions affect her. It is hard to describe how exactly – it is not quite fear (fortunately there is nothing really scary in the movie), but it did impact her enough that she didn’t want to carry on watching after a break. I did want her to finish though so that she could get to the end and see how everything resolves. We did finish, and we spoke a lot about what was happening as things moved along, and in the end she really liked the end when everyone was happy. And then the processing and questions started, but it has been good fun answering them.

The one thing that I really liked was when she asked me about Biltong during the break, when she was actually asking about Gaston.

This special treat has only happened three times in Grace’s life, once from Keren, once from Gogo and today for the first time, a special treat from mom….the train actually goes if you put money in it…

Grace met baby Asher Parker for the first time today and had the mommies laughing when she said, “Asher’s hair has gotten so long.”