Happy Hippo Birthday T!

Last weekend we celebrated T's second birthday in the backyard with lots of friends, lots of food, lots of mimosas and bloody mary's and one lumpy, collapsed blue cake!  My birthday party (and I guess party in general) specialty here is brunch since I can make almost everything in advance and just heat things up in the morning and because it is much easier to serve just bloody mary's and mimosas along with some coffee and juice than to operate a full bar.  Also, my children become evil, grumpy, nasty little monsters after about 5pm so evening gatherings aren't really their strong suit.

I was a bit concerned about planning poor little T's party after the unicorn and dragon extravaganza that was K's last birthday party.  I was struggling to come up with a theme when T herself provided one during our last trip to Lower Zambezi.  The girl is obsessed with hippos!  She got so excited ever time we saw any that it seemed like the obvious choice for the birthday theme.  

So, we committed to hippos, brunch, and a date and proceeded full speed ahead.  I ordered lots of hippo plates, and a pinata, and cute little napkins and a nifty little hippo cake topper... or I thought I had ordered a nifty little hippo cake topper which I planned to put in a perfectly lovely round blue cake (a river, obviously).  Except two nights before the party I finally got around to opening the giant box of hippo paraphernalia and no cake topper.  Not because the company forgot to include it.  Oh no!  because I forgot to order it!  I looked at it, I decided I wanted it, but I left off that crucial step of actually clicking on it and putting it into my cart and purchasing it.  Whoops!  Not a problem thought as we have lots of little colorful stone hippos from the local junk market.  Not exactly the look I was going for but it would be fine.  Just fine!  Blue cake (red velvet cake with blue food coloring instead of red).  Not just any cake, mind you, but the same recipe I have been using successfully since 2002.  I have probably made this same cake twenty or thirty times.  Indeed, it is the cake I dyed green earlier this year and cut into the shape of a dragon!  And all I wanted to do this time was color it blue and have a basic two tiered round cake.  Simple!  But then, this happened:

It's a caketastropy!!!

The first layer seemed a bit unstable but I was able to get icing on it.  The second layer was causing a bit of concern and then, at the first spoonful of icing, utter and complete collapse.  I kept adding more icing in hopes I could sort of glue it all back together but it rapidly became apparent that it was just making things worse.  So, I did what any responsible parent would do 15 hours out from a party with a debacle of a cake on her hands.  I stuck it in the fridge, poured myself a glass of wine, and decided to deal with it in the morning!

Once it chilled a bit in the fridge I was able to add a bit more icing and while it was still a lumpy mess we decided it looked rather lie a river in which hippos might live so good enough!  And, not surprisingly, no two-year olds minded one bit that the cake was wonky.  They were all too excited about their blue tongues to care at all.

Victory (or close enough)!

The party was great with a bunch of awesome people.  We had a pinata with pull strings, rather than the traditional whack it with a stick model because I was still a bit emotionally scarred by the stick wielding children from K's party.  This was much safer!  Perhaps slightly less exciting, but so much less stressful.  The kids drew all over the playhouse with chalk, overfed the bunnies (apparently they like banana bread, who knew!), generally ran amuck in the yard, and overall had a ton of fun.  Perhaps I am recalling the morning with mimosa goggles, but I don't really remember a singly screaming fit or fight.  A birthday miracle!

Sting pinata- all the candy without the horrible fear of someone getting hit with a stick!

T got a baby stroller of her own, which she loves, and an awesome piggy pillow.  So cute!

Happy sisters!  Super cute dresses courtesy of grandparents, of course!

Whoops...

Did anyone else totally and completely misplace the months of August and September?  I know October just snuck up on me leaving me feeling a bit confused and discombobulated.  Not that anything drastic or terribly dramatic happened over the past two months.  Just getting into the new normal of our daily routine with K back in school (which she loves) and me starting a new job (which I love) has thrown things off kilter enough to make life feel hectic and rushed.  But, the good news is, I think we are really finally hitting our stride and that October should be awesome!

While the majority of you are starting to enjoy varying degrees of crisp fall weather , things are starting to really heat up here.  We even had one almost 100 degree day, which was a bit brutal.  We are still a few weeks away from rain, as evidenced by the thin layer of red dust that covers everything outside.  I can't wait for the first big rain to come and clean everything up.  It really is quite odd thinking that we haven't had rain since sometime way back in May.  Of course, the rain is going to create some logistical problems with the pet bunnies (which are holding at a total of seven, though I am currently suspicious that there are babies in the burrow again).  We are going to have to create some sort of rain shelter to keep the poor things from being perpetually soaked.

Two of my cousins were in country for a couple of weeks.  It sounded like they had an amazing trip and we were lucky enough to get to spend one small leg of it with them at one of our favorite lodges on the Lower Zambezi.  The elephants were out in force.  On one river cruise we must have seen close to forty of them!  We even got to see a group crossing the river.  Plus lots of crocs and, of course, the omnipresent hippos.  And the adults all had to jump out and push the boat at one point when we got stuck on a sandbank (the Kafue dam had unexpectedly shut a couple of its gates and teh water level dropped a good meter or more overnight).  The girls both had a great time and T especially enjoyed all the hippos.  I am starting to hope just a little that maybe she will actually remember some of this adventure after all, especially if we keep showing her photos and talking to her about all the amazing things she has seen in Africa.  After all, she does turn two tomorrow!

The closes thing we have to a family photo in which all of us look nice.  Poor K, just cannot smile for a photograph, she always ends up looking pained or angry, when in fact she really has a lovely, lovely smile.

One of the big groups of elephants we saw.  Almost certainly all bachelor males hanging out together.  This bunch was very playful and relaxed as they came down for an afternoon drink.  Coincidentally, I was also having an afternoon drink on the water!  Gin and tonic, of course, as it is important to take all necessary precautions against malaria.

We came around a bend in the river just in time to see a group of four elephants crossing at a shallow spot.  We just drifted closer and closer and they totally ignored us and went on their merry way.  It was really neat and the girls were fascinated.

One of the many medium sized crocs we saw on this trip.  We have seen bigger in the past, but these guys were less shy and would let the boat float right up to them without scurrying off.

Finally!  The classic hippo shot!

Its a rough life, but someone has to do it.

I liked how this guy was staring us down from the grass trying to decide what he thought about us.  I also like his little passenger.

And that is all for now!  More soon, I hope!

In reverse chronological order...

Where is K?  Oh, up there!

I should mention that sitting down to create this post caused me a great deal of panic when I suddenly thought I had lost all of the photos I took on our last two safaris since they should have been in my "most recent" file but instead were nowhere to be found.  I was freaking out, especially since these were all photos I took with my nice, new camera rendering them extra sharp and lovely.  Then I realized the problem was not the camera, or the computer, but someone, ahem, doesn't know the difference between June and July and set the month incorrectly on the new camera, causing the photos to hide back in last month's stash.  Mystery solved, problem fixed, whew!

So, we have had a busy July.  In reverse order, C and I spent last Monday and Tuesday night at a great bush camp on an island in the middle of the Zambezi River. The girls stayed home with our nanny and housekeeper and this arrangement seemed to work swimmingly for everyone involved.  C and I got to enjoy river cruises, a walking safari, fishing (C caught a big tiger fish!), several naps and an ample amount of quiet reading time while the girls got two days of lots of candy and I don't even want to know how much TV.  Win-win!

One of the many, many crocs we saw on the river

We also had very good luck with lots of elephant sightings.  Plus, both nights and elephant came and scratched himself on a tree right outside our chalet right after bedtime.  Sounded remarkably like a rubber raft being dragged across grass

And we saw many hippos, including several outside the water which just amuses me to no end.  Several also enjoyed late night snacks in close proximity to us.  They are not quiet eaters!

Earlier this month we did a getaway for the whole family to South Luangwa.  BEautiful, amazing, utterly realizing.  Had I not had an event that Monday morning I was fully ready to pull out the credit card to stay for another night.  We did several game drives, including a couple of night drives, and saw giraffes, elephants, hippos, all of the impala and their ilk, a hyena, a porcupine, warthogs, some cape buffalo, a very brief spotting of a leopard, and recurring encounters with three male lions.  Unfortunately, K had demanded to see "girl lions" so the fact that we kept running into these three very lazy juvenile males became a bit of a running joke with us and the lodge staff as it seemed to just frustrate her more each time.  We even tried lying to her and saying they were girl lions, but she knows better, pointing out that "they have HAIR so they are BOYS!"  T kept saying "hi" and "bye" to all of the animals, which was very cute.

Anyway, school starts in two weeks and I start a new, part-time job a few weeks after that so our summer routine is definitely about to get shaken up.  But mostly I am scheming about getting back out into the bush since we have learned that the girls are old enough to handle a trip relatively well or that we can leave them behind and that also works.  Both of these discoveries open up all kinds of fun options!

At one point on a drive I said to K, "look over there!" Her response, with heavy, worldly sigh, "mom, its just an elephant."  Yup, just an elephant...

They are getting good at this whole game drive thing.

Funny little warthogs

Giraffes!

The male lions we just kept running into over and over again

School is out!

Weather-wise it has been a glorious week here.  After a couple weeks were it was genuinely cool during the day (requiring a light jacket and everything) and downright chilly at night it warmed back up this week and while the mornings and evenings were crisp, it was sunny and lovely during the day.  We shall see what the next few weeks of "winter" bring and whether it will cool off again or hold steady until things start to warm up in earnest in late August/ early September.

K finished pre-school this week.  Not pre-K, which is what she would have been enrolled in next year if we weren't moving her to the Montessori school.  Between play-school, pre-school and pre-K I swear I can never keep them all straight!  So, school is out and she will be at a new school for next year for several reasons.  For one, her previous school more or less laughed at us when we inquired as to whether T could enroll in play-school in January.  Due to a whole host of factors classes are full there, and almost everywhere else in town as well.  But the larger factor is that K's teacher this year seemed, by the end of the year, to just not like her very much and I am concerned that he shared this attitude that she was a "bad" kid or "trouble-maker" with all of the other teachers in the Early Learning Center.  Now, I am not claiming that K is an angel.  She is not!  In fact, I frequently describe her by recalling one of the early scenes in Jurassic Park.  Remember the one where they talk about the velociraptors systematically testing the fences for weaknesses?  Yup, thats my daughter!  If there are structure and clear expectations and consequences in her universe, she is great.  Take those elements away and she will run amuck and push boundaries to her heart's content.  Take, for instance, the issue of wearing shoes.  She doesn't like to wear them.  I don't really make her wear them at home, but if we leave the house she is supposed to have them on.  And she is supposed to wear them at school.  But she always had her shoes off when I picked her up because no number of times of me telling her to keep her shoes on at school were going to matter when she experienced no consequences at school for taking the shoes off.  She still got to play and participate and go outside, so why would she leave them on?  And asking me to try to get her to keep her shoes on, when you as the teacher and assistant don't actually follow through is just not going to work.

Also, the school was a bit too guitar-playing, kumbaya-singing, touchy-feely for my liking.  For example, over Christmas holiday K learned to write her name with help from our nanny.  She could write the whole thing, all of the letters, without tracing or having to copy it. She went back to school and they are constantly coming home with coloring sheets or things they have painted, or stuff they have cut out and glued.  I noticed that either her name was not on her stuff or that the teacher was obviously writing it.  I pointed out, you know, she can write her name.  The teacher agreed, said he had seen her do it.  I asked, well, can you ask her to write it on her artwork so she is practicing it.  Well, we don't want to make them write their names because then they might not like doing it anymore.  Seriously!  For real?!?!  She can write her name, she should be writing it on her paper!  And now she actually can't do it anymore.  Has forgotten how because there was no repetition.  Anyway, those are a few of my gripes with her old school.  And yes, I am aware that a Montessori school will not, by its very nature, have a lot of structure.  But at least I know that going in and can compensate as I see fit.

In other news, K the destroyer and eater of worlds broke a good friend's arm on a bouncy castle on Friday morning.  Not on purpose, of course, but ugh, I still feel awful.  I feel extra awful because the medical care here is so crappy they can't even really figure out if it is a broken arm or if it is a dislocated elbow or if it is broken whether to put a cast on it and if they do put a cast on it the cast will be an old-school plaster one.  Its a kid's broken arm, not brian surgery (which I KNOW they can't do)!  Very upsetting and disturbing.

What else... we FINALLY got our AFN satellite working again.  The timing was good in that we manage to miss all of the interminably long NBA season but there is still plenty of good baseball left to be played.  I am concerned that with school out and TV functional again we are going to need to set some serious screen time boundaries for the girls since while we were subsisting on DVDs alone the TV time was pretty limited.

Not much else to report and this whole thing really lacks a cohesive point so why don't I just wrap it up with some cute kid shots?

The girls enjoying some sort of book club/ tea party created by K 

T trying to get K to "papu" her (carry her around on her back).  I fear K would be more than happy to oblige which would almost certainly end in disaster.

T with a baby, and, oddly since it hasn't rained in two months, rain boots.

T still loves Cleopatra and hugs her almost every time she goes in or out the front door.

The monkeys at play in their natural habitat

Their ability to not only find dirty but also to ensure that they are throughly coated in it is really quite impressive!

Typical

My weekly trip to the grocery store this morning included an experience that is just so typical of our time here in Africa.  Overall, it was quite a successful trip.  The store had parmesan cheese (which had been out of stock for months, and by out of stock I mean none anywhere in town, rumor is that the one importer in the whole country had his truck stopped at the border, possibly for failing to provide proper, ahem, compensation to the border guards and it was held up for so long that the whole shipment went bad and it took another month or so to get the next shipment) and nice looking eggplant, both of which were on my list.  They also had the greek yogurt I like and the little baby bell mini cheeses K likes in her school snack (stocking up for the last week of school next week, sniff sniff, tears).  In fact, I found everything on my list and I got in early enough that I beat the crowd and check out lines were short, all of which was very exciting.  Then, in the checkout line I noticed that the foil seal on top of the six-pack of small fruit yogurts I picked up for the girls was defective on one of the yogurts.  It wasn't sealed properly and was leaking a bit.  I brought this to the attention of the check out person and she sent the bagger off to pick up a new one, all of which made perfect sense and was surprisingly efficient.  Things went off the rails when the woman came back with another one which was also defective, explaining that "they are all like that."  And then they were both surprised and somewhat offended when I said no, I won't be buying the improperly sealed yogurt regardless of whether they are all like that or not!

The yogurt is a small, almost insignificant thing, but it is such a typical example of how things go wrong here.  The yogurt is sold under an international brand but is packaged and distributed locally.  I have seen their plant in town.  So, something obviously went wrong at the packaging level but instead of deciding that it was not appropriate to send out an improperly packaged product the plant went right ahead and shipped out a batch of leaky yogurt.  So, fail one for the plant.  Then, the store had no issues with accepting and stocking faulty yogurt, fail two for the store.  Finally, the staff at the store actually I thought I was the one in the wrong for taking issue with being sold leaky yogurt.  After all, they are all like that so they must be fine!  Fail three for the store.  Oh, and, as I was finishing up a guy at the next checkout line over was having the exact same yogurt experience but in the end he just accepted it and bought, for full price, the defective yogurt.  Fail four for the consumer who accepts what should be an unacceptable product.  As I said, the yogurt is a small thing, but all of the things that had to go wrong, all of the bad judgement or no judgement at all the contributed to getting to that experience in the checkout line are totally typical and unfortunately are not limited to yogurt.  Imagine for a moment when that sort of thinking (or lack thereof) gets applied to business deals, property transactions, policing, the judiciary, and foreign policy.  And now how about a collective heavy sigh.....

On a much, much lighter note, the bunnies are rogue no more!  Our gardener constructed a lovely little pen for them and they have not managed to escape yet after 4 full days of imprisonment.  They seem happy enough (it is honestly a bit hard to tell) and it is nice that the girls can come out and watch them from the porch whenever they want.  I am also hopeful that with some time and patience and lots of lettuce and carrots we may be able to get them a bit more comfortable with people such that they could occasionally be petted or held.  We shall see.

Bunnies in their new home

T enjoying her starter Brio set C just brought home from Germany.

She looks all cute and innocent....

One last shot of K from sports day last week.  If you look closely you see she still suffers from Schumitsch tongue.  The only real way to focus!

Bunnies and Birthdays

It has been so long since I posted that Blogger revamped its format and it took me forever this morning to figure out how to do a new post.  But I did, finally!

First, let me take this opportunity to introduce you to our new bunnies, Madeline (in white) and Beast (black and white), names courtesy of K.  Madeline is a female young adult and Beast is a teenage male so yes, it is quite possible that they will do what bunnies do and we will soon have several more bunnies.  But, these are yard bunnies, meaning they live outside, eat whatever vegetation they can scavenge and generally are only marginally cared for by us so I am assuming that through a combination of nature taking its course and the occasional donation of bunnies to someone else we can keep the population to around 5 or 6 total in the long term.  Originally, the plan was that the bunnies would just have the whole front yard in which to romp, and I had the gardener put up chicken wire on the fence thinking that would be sufficient to keep them in place.  Little did I know that I was dealing with very creative and very greedy bunnies!  They keep escaping into the back yard which is, of course, where the vegetable gardens are.  Now, I don't mind so much if they nibble on my garden as we never manage to eat everything out of it anyway, but they are also terrorizing the staff garden which is much more obnoxious and unacceptable so on Monday I will have the gardener build a large pen for them and they will have to stay in there.  How we are going to catch them to put them in said pen I have no idea, though I suspect the pool skimmer net may be involved...

Madeline and Beast being naughty, greedy bunnies and hanging out in our garden.

K and T are both doing well.  School is wrapping up over the next week and a half and K had sports day on Friday.  While the school provided a very elaborate and fun set up at a certain point the kids discovered a hill and realized that rolling down it was a lot more fun than anything else.

T is finally starting to use words to articulate thoughts which is making life somewhat easier, though frequently her requests are for things she just isn't going to get (most frequently juice... she is a little juice addict).  She also mimics absolutely everything K does, which is cute about 80% of the time and incredibly annoying the rest of the time.

T modeling dressy shoes with pj pants.  Quite a look!  And she makes that face almost every time anyone points a camera in her general direction.

In other news, K had her 4th birthday party last weekend.  No, her birthday isn't until July but since almost everyone leaves either to move on to their next post or to go home on R&R at the end of this month she would not have had any friends with which to celebrate.  I suspect this may quickly become a theme of life overseas with lots of early birthday parties.

We went with a dragon and unicorn theme, complete with two cakes, big chalk dragons and unicorns sketched on the playhouse (by someone with more artistic talent than I), a dragon and unicorn pinata and other assorted stuff and things.  Plus, as it was brunch, lots of mimosas and bloody marys for the adults. I think everyone had fun.  At one point we had a swirling mass of 30 or so kids in the back yard, which was a bit chaotic but mostly in a good way.  

K about to blow out her candles.

One of the rare "family" photos in which I am actually included.  Unfortunately, T's nanny was doing such a good job of keeping her entertained and out of the way we had no idea where she was so she got left out.  Poor second child. 

But, this is photographic evidence that she was present at the party!

The dragon- red velvet cake inside so he was nice and bloody when we cut into him.

The unicorn- made by using a silicon mold so the external shell is a mix of peanut butter edible clay and marzipan, decorated with edible luster dust and the inside was chocolate cake and chocolate pudding.

The calm before the storm.

K attacking an innocent, but candy filled, unicorn... I am note sure who thought it was a good idea to arm children with sticks, let them take swings at something, and then have them trample each other in a quest to gather fallen candy but who am I to mess with tradition.

Tafari!

 Last weekend we spent four days out on tafari (K's term) and it was amazing!  We were lucky enough to get to join some friends on one of the opening weekend for their lodge and they were doing a special trip for families (they don't usually allow kids) so it was a very special opportunity to share a great trip with the girls and not be terrified that our kids were the ones ruining things for someone else since everyone had kids and the blame could be shared equally.  

Friday morning we left the house by 6:30 and managed to miss all of the rush hour traffic and get out of town quickly.  The drive through the escarpment was fun, as always, since it involves a strange combination of broken-down vehicles, usually in the worst possible place, like a blind corner going up a hill (I think they do it on purpose), missing shoulder guard rails and the occasional remnants of minor rock slides!  Good times!  But traffic was light and the weather was perfect and we made good time to the lodge where we parked the truck and transfered to a boat.  

The two hour boat ride was surprisingly pleasant with both K and T taking short naps and the adults enjoying a lovely cold beer at 10:00!  That was just the start of a low level buzz that carried through the whole weekend.  If you have never had a Pimm's and lemonade you must have one.  Now.  No really, right now, go buy some Pimm's and lemonade and make one.  I'll wait....

Ok, that's better!  Keep sipping one of those every few hours for three days straight and see how wonderfully relaxed and blissed out you feel!  

After the boat ride we got settled in camp.  Our lodgings were what can best be described as a very high end tent.  The platform and frame and other aspects of the structure are built of wood and then the heavy canvas tent sort of sits on top.  But believe me, this is the most luxurious tent you have ever been in!  As most of you know, I don't camp, so you can rest assured that we were not in any way roughing it.  I think the bed may also have been the largest bed I have ever slept in.  It had to have been larger than a standard king... as in I think C must have also been sleeping in it, but he was so far away that I certainly didn't notice.  We also had space for a small cot for K and for T's travel bed.  The structure also had a great little porch looking out over the river.  The whole front of the tent overlooking the river was mesh so when the sun came up in the morning it was like the whole room would just start to softly glow, and then turn pink and then you could start to see the trees and river as you listened to the birds, monkeys and hippos waking up.  Somehow waking up to that at 5:30 is much less painful than waking up to my alarm clock at the same time.  Funny that.  We also had a hippo eating grass right outside at 3am on morning and you could totally hear him munching away and when I peeked out there was just this giant dark mass right there, which made me decide that a flashlight was probably a bad idea.

Elephants were really the theme of the weekend and they were doing their very best to put on a show.  We saw baby elephants, young male elephants trying to act big and scary, elephants bathing in the river, elephants swimming across the river, elephants blocking the road and making us turn around, elephants walking through camp, elephants doing pretty much any and all of the cool elephant things that they can do and almost always quite close.

The theme of the weekend for the kids was probably sand.  There was sand therefore there were happy children!  Holes were dug, castles constructed, race tracks graded, treasures discovered and re-buried.  We may still be finding sand in some shoes and hats a week later but who cares!  The kids were entertained.

We got to meet some great new people and all of the kids played nicely together and kept themselves entertained so most of the adults really and truly got to relax.  We ate absurdly well, I got to read almost an entire book, and felt well rested despite the early mornings.  Coming back to town and going to work the next day was a bit of a shock to the system but the whole adventure was a great reminder of why we live overseas.

K and I on our porch.  Look closely in the gap between the side of the tent and the wooden wall.  See him?  He wandered over and had a snack right in front of the tent and just hung out for a good 20 minutes.  So cool!

 This guy was trying very hard to convince us that he was scary.  Lots of ear flapping and some trumpeting.  This was one of those instances when having somewhat loud children in the car was less than helpful.

 T and K enjoying a carved friend.  The wooden hippo was probably almost as popular as sand and sticks.  The whole hoard of children would just have to sit on it any time they walked near it.

I like that the elephants are walking through in the background as is of cue... Ok, its day three, a herd of cape buffalo alone won't be impressive anymore, send in the elephants!

 K taking a photo of one of the two male lions we found.  We saw the same pair twice and this photo is from the first day we saw them.  They were obviously hungry so they were a bit skittish and I was trying to feed T her weight in jellybeans to get her to keep quiet because she kept wanting to say "hiiiiiii liioonn!!" loudly... and repeatedly...

 Same lion eying us suspiciously before slinking off into the bush.

 Just a few of the many, many elephants.

 K with a stick.  Literally drawing lines in the sand and telling people they could not cross them.  Good god!  We were at an old village site from before the area became a national park and all settlements were moved out.  We were looking for pottery shards and grinding stones and checking out animal tracks.  The kids loved it!

T relaxing and checking out some rocks.  We somehow managed to not let her get sunburned at all over the whole trip which is minor miracle and involved vats of sunscreen, several different hats, and making the poor kid wear long sleeves even though it was pretty warm.

The two male lions the second time we saw them looking fat, happy, sleep and sleepy.  This time the chatter from the girls did not even phase them as they were much to contented in their nice shady spot to be bothered by us.