Moira

I heard your voice in a supermarket the other day, Moira. I turned around, really expecting to see you standing there. The woman who the voice belonged to regarded me quizzically while I stared at her face expecting yours to materialize. For a moment I forgot that you are dead. There is no light way …

The trouble with being little

Barring the last week, Alex has been having a bit of a rough time since school started again this year. Being quite a reserved child, he sometimes struggles to fit in with the crowd. I can relate, because I was never really a mainstream kid. He has always been quite an intense child, we even …

Is this a dream?

I started writing this post almost two weeks ago, amidst the craziest, most emotionally draining week of my life. I could not bring myself to hit publish, as if saying the words out loud made them real, and the real-ness of all this was something I was not quite ready for. The temptation to predict …

Pain

Pain is the body's way of letting the brain know that something is wrong. From a simple tooth ache, to a broken limb, the pain receptors send the messages to let us know that we must take some action. In January 2012, while down in Ballito, I woke up one morning and literally had to …

The Joys of Parenting. Not

Alex has a nasty bug brewing in his tonsils, and has literally been man-down since Saturday afternoon. (Unless you count the half an hour or so windows after the Neurofen Syrup has been imbibed, and he is bouncing off the walls for a little bit. What DO they put into that stuff?) It is heart-breaking watching …

Give me a naughty child any day

Day six of forty degree temperatures on and off and I am at my wits end. My boy shows small glimmers of his usual demeanour in the "pumped up on empaped" window. The rest of the time, he sleeps, whines, or stares blankly at the TV. We usually have an energiser bunny on our hands, …

Hello 2012!

It's January 1st and I feel like I have been out partying all night. Although my "hangover" is due to a lack of sleep and not over-indulgence. Alex has been sick for almost two weeks. Our holiday has included 2 trips to the emergency room (real trips this time) and one visit to a GP. …

The other night at the emergency room

 “The decision to have a child is to accept that your heart will forever walk about outside your body." Katherine Hadley  A few Saturday's ago, we were watching TV, when we heard Alex scream from his bedroom. We both went bolting upstairs to see what was wrong. He has been having some "age-appropriate" nightmares of …