A(nother African) Day in the Life...: October 2013

Joshua's Birthday

Catching up a bit here - having just downloaded photos to the computer!

As Joshua is getting older and more mature (ha!) this year's party was a bit more grown up - namely going to the cinema with a few friends, and then to KFC. Incidentally, this was exactly a week before the Westgate attack, in a very similar mall. We are very grateful!

However, he is not quite a grown up yet - so there still had to be a cake. As Joshua's main entertainment at the moment is Minecraft (Google it, if you don't have a boy aged between 8 and 18...), it of course had to be a Minecraft cake - Libby pulled out one of her usual corkers:

Memory book

Just taking some photos for the Kenya memory book.

For posterity

In my experience, I forget the stages of our children's development pretty quickly as they get overlaid with new stages. So for posterity, here are some of the things Ruben is into:

* swinging lights

* pretty much anything that swings, spins or rotates

* wheels, and anything with wheels

* running everywhere at breakneck speed

* Joshua's Lego

* sweets, especially ones he finds in Joshua's sweety pot, or in anyone's top drawers (which he has found are generally good for a lolly or two)

* music - anything with a decent beat that he can boogie to

* being outside

* balls (every day he tries to join the rounders team at school)

I don't know how these things translate, but I am very interested to see what he ends up doing when he grows up!

(sorry about the picture quality - the iPod is a lot quicker to take photos with than getting out the 'real' camera!)

Life as normal (on Sunday)

Life goes on as normal. No power all day Friday (I was going to do washing as we finally had a full tank of water, but then the power went off-sigh!). No power Saturday afternoon and now the power has gone off again-argh!!!!!! Yes I have got the dinner in the oven and it isn't cooked. Two days of power cuts and I was so sure we were good to go today. Now I need to work out how to cook meat loaf on the gas. Pretty sure I can transform it into spaghetti bolognese! Not sure about the baked potatoes.

Caleb is off to his fourth party in two weekends. His first was at an art centre where he made a very cool wooden plane. That was 2pm-5:30pm on the now infamous 21st. The next one started at 6pm on the same day and was an angry birds sleep over. I really didn't want him to go because of the terrorists on the rampage, but I did as it seemed to be no point in spoiling his fun, just because I was edgy. This weekend he went to a Bear Grylls camp out, which he returned from this morning. A few hours break and he is on to a pizza and swimming party for the afternoon. It's going to be hard to pry him from his bed tomorrow morning at 6:30am for school. Caleb lives life to the max.

As Caleb was away, we decided (randomly) to give Joshua and Bethany their first driving lesson. No time has not gone fast, they are still 10 and 12, we just have a small automatic and a big compound, so it seemed like fun. They loved it. Bethany has had a second lesson since. Caleb was mad when he found out. Not sure his legs are quite long enough!!