Eli was standing at the window and a hadeda went, “HAA!” (because in Cape Town, for some reason, the hadedas only say “HAA!” instead of the usual, “Ha-ha-HAA!” – life under the mountain has clearly affected them). So the hadeda goes, “HAA!” which Eli thinks that someone is shouting “BYE!” to him, and he lifts his hand, waves and says “By, by.”

Eli is very into handing things to people: credit cards, food (fresh or from his mouth), toys, cellphones, and the likes. He has also been waking up somewhere between 05h15 and 05h30 which means I need to get up and try to stop him from waking Grace and disturbing Donné (who has been doing night shifts…no, he’s not sleeping through yet). Put these together and his way of encouraging me to get out of bed is to first hand me my cellphone from next to the side of the bed, pass me my clothes from the floor, and then open my bedside cabinet draw, pull out my glasses and hand them to me (which I really don’t like him doing because I don’t have a backup set of “eyes” at the moment…and glasses, all glasses, are a no anyway). Needless to say, saving my glasses from baby hands gets me up and going quickly in the morning. Fortunately he really is just handing them to me, not squishing them in any way. His way of saying, “Up you get Dad! Time to feed me and play.”