Donné and Grace worked on cutting today, and Grace twigged how the scissors worked….and then there was lots of cutting, and line drawing and cutting along the lines. And crown making, because crowns are awesome.

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This afternoon we went to Leah’s 2nd birthday. Grace had lots of fun eating fizzers, having her face painted by aunty Mel and playing on the tractors.

Grace and I sent Donné and Keren off for some baby-free sister time and took a trip to Stodels this afternoon to feed the animals and play.

Grace really enjoys animals but can sometimes be intimidated by some of the bigger ones. I fed the lama and told Grace how gentle it was. After that I heard, “Gentle lama, gentle lama,” many times, but Grace was then quite happy to feed the lama. I found it quite interesting to see how much her whole attitude to feeding changed compleatly after that. Just a small mind shift for an entirely different response.

A little while back our friend John taught me a life lesson. We were in Yzerfontein and I was taking some photos with his camera. I decided to delete some of them and pushed the delete button and without thinking about it too much followed the same procedure as my camera…..except that starts to delete all the photos on the camera (and there were lots, including new born photos of his little girl).

I pressed cancel as soon as I realised what was happening, and I am not really sure if it did delete any photos, but I felt terrible and told John what had happened. His immediate reaction? “Oh, life’s like that,” and moved on with little concern.

I on the other hand tend to get a bit worked up (at least internally) about those kind of things, so last night I had to take a page out of the lesson book.

We assembled our Ultimaker 3D printer last night and I set up (and tested) a camera for taking a time lapse video. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do with the video, and then through chatting while building cam up with an even cleared idea – I could visualise exactly how the video was going to go and what the message of it would be. I was feeling very excited.

Everything was working well before the time and about half way through the evening I checked on the output to find that I had 4000 photographs of a box on the desk – somehow it had gotten stuck on the first photo, so half the video was gone. I was bleak. So I had to remind myself of John’s lesson: “life’s like that,” we can’t be too attached to some particular outcome. Eventually that attachment becomes a hinderance for moving forward.

So now we have half a time lapse video of the machine build 🙂

One side note: attachment and commitment mean totally different things. Being committed to an outcome plays a critical role in pushing through the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve a meaningful goal.

Just as she got into the bath Grace needed to use the facilities, so to stay warm I wrapped her up.

Today I went to observe at the Montessori school we are probably going to send Grace to.  Duncan and Grace dropped me off before they headed off to swimming.  Before I got out the car Grace said that I must go with to her swimming lesson, but it turns out that she only wanted me to come with so that her baby brother could go watch her swim 🙂

Jack & Grace have developed a very sweet friendship and one of the things that is very cute is how they copy each other, both in what they do as well as what they say.

We always thank God for our food at supper, but usually Grace doesn’t want to pray with us – probably because she wants to eat rather than pray at that moment – but we always include her.

First you paint mommy’s