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We had a rather horrible experience at one of the local parks yesterday, as photos from this gallery shows. So I got Edie to help me write a letter to the Council about this - here’s her contribution: “Workers, please fix the park. It is not a bad park at all! I’m sad because the park is broken!”. And then she did a little song and dance number about it not being a horrible park.

(Other Edie cuteness involves her describing my job as “Daddy, do you sit at the computer and say ‘Aarrrgh! Computer, please work!’ ?” and after a fight with Rebecca (’cause she woke Rebecca up after a night when Skye had kept her awake too much) running to her room, grabbing her toy phone and pronouncing “Mummy’s ugly! I’m calling the police!”))

Skye’s sleeping here in the study. She woke up early in the morning, and wouldn’t sleep despite feeding - so I took over at about 5.30am. After some playing with Edie’s “steering wheel” toy, some Purity peaches, and a bit of Takelane Sesame, Skye’s asleep again. I’m sure its a result of human evolution or something, but there’s something incredibly adorable about sleeping babies! Yesterday we were over at Lettie’s place (which was quite hectic at first - there’s this mad aunt who was trying to chase Lettie out of her house - she was chased away by flourishing legal paperwork) and Rebecca and Lettie were hanging out in the bedroom, feeding Percy and Skye together while Gift and Edie played together. Life can be so chilled sometimes!

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Lettie and Asanda’s baby, Percy was born yesterday, at 3.30 in the morning. He weighed 4.3 kgs! (He was a bit overdue - and Lettie was going to have the birth induced on Wednesday morning if he didn’t come out - rather like with Edie, actually. So he saw he was going to be evicted, and moved out first instead! Wise choice….) Lettie’s tired but happy, Asanda’s VERY happy (and struggling to get paint off his hands - he was working on a painting job and was using gloss…. hehe) - we’ll see how Gift responds to her baby brother. She and Edie had fun playing for a while last night and looking at the new baba.

Well that ends the run of babies in our friendship circle - since last year we’ve seen Maya, Skye, Ruby, Buhle, Connor and now Percy arriving. Oh, and of course Max all the way over in Mexico! Sjoe, quite a run…

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Our whole family went comet spotting last night, looking for Comet McNaught. Well, we had a go at comet spotting the night before - we took a picnic dinner out to Noordhoek beach, but it was all clouded over and started raining as soon as we got there, so that was a bit of a disaster. And then Edie stubbed her toe - lots of blood and tears….

So anyway, we tried again last night, first driving up to the Steenbras dam, from where we watched the sunset, and then down along the beach road towards Strand, as it was getting dark. Edie was quite excited, even though she was disappointed that she couldn’t hold a star in her hand (she’s got a book, Thuli’s Mattress, about a girl who goes on a night time journey on her bouncy mattress and catches a star along the way). Oh, Edie says that when she grows up she’ll be a teacher with pink hair (and all her children will be very happy about this, apparently)!

As it got dark, we finally saw the comet - Danie spotted it first, and then pointed it out to the rest of us. Unfortunately we couldn’t stop for long, ’cause then Skye started crying again - but all along the way home we kept watching it, till it set behind the mountains near Fish Hoek. Edie wasn’t that impressed at first - she wanted a purple comet, or a yellow one - like the pretty stickers she got from the museum once. And of course she doesn’t understand how rare such a sight is - apparently McNaught is the brightest comet since Ikeya-Seki in 1965. Its a rather humbling thing, for me at least. I remember my grandfather’s stories of how he snuck out of bed at boarding school to see Halley’s Comet in 1910 - he was 10 years old at the time. He didn’t live to see it again, in 1986. I saw Halley in 1986, a rather disappointingly fuzzy blob… next time round, if I survive I’ll be 89 next time Halley comes around - the scale of these events is awesome, dwarfing our lifetimes. Comet McNaught has an orbital period measured in millions of years, so in a few days it’ll be bye bye McNaught, never gonna see you again. Wow!

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Edie has passed out, fast asleep at the kitchen table. One minute she was whining about her soup and bread, and then, when I turned to look (I was washing pre-Xmas dishes and wondering why she was so quiet) her eyes were closed. Wow An hour or so earlier she was tearing around the house, despite Danie’s attempts to convince her to sleep - the rest of us were passed out on the couch, on top of me (I seem to make an ok bed for Skye) and in the bedroom…

Anyway, Skye’s over two months old now. She likes playing under her baby gym sometimes, and she’s started smiling these cute baby smiles and making cooing noises. She’s got an ever-changing routine - the last couple of days it seems to be mostly eating all the time, earlier in the week it was snacking and crying lots - personally, I prefer her glugging mode. She and Rebecca were in hospital two weeks back, because she had a little chest infection - so that was fairly hectic, but it all turned out well in the end. I think she had this lingering infection for a while, because for a few weeks she didn’t really seem to get comfortable. Things are working out quite well with Danie around most of the time, its really helpful to have three adults around, and the adults all get on well (ok, sometimes we get on each others nerves, but that’s largely when we’re tired or overworked).

We’ve been trying to counter-brainwash Edie - from school and her friends she gets all this brainwashing about what a girl must be like (e.g. this afternoon “I must have nail polish, I’m a girl!”), so we’ve been pushing back a bit… teaching her the basics about capitalists (she said she wants a capitalist too, but then changed her mind when I pointed out that she’d then have to work all the time. Oh, and bourgeois pigs - its a running joke around here that if you don’t share you’re a bourgeois pig - so when I was coming back from the national Indymedia meeting in Durban, Edie and Danie were in a pub, watching rugby on TV. She asked what it was, and when Danie said it was rugby, Edie responded “Noooo…. they’re fighting over a ball! They bourgeois pigs, they must share!!” The entire pub burst out laughing… its an ongoing debate as to whether Barbie is a bourgeois pig or not - a recent stalemate had Edie arguing that Erin (her friend)’s Barbie is a bourgeois pig, but her one isn’t (except… Edie doesn’t have a Barbie… apparently “her Barbie” is the one pictured in a magazine). Ah well, a luta continua.

Anyway, Edie’s awake now, friends have come to visit and everyone’s eating mince pies. I’ll end here then.

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So there are some cute photos from Skye’s first bathtime online now. They include Edie singing to Skye in the bath, ’cause Skye was crying (the song was “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing”) and Danie’s baptism as a daddy. I held off a bit before posting these pictures, as I hadn’t told my mother yet that Danie is Skye’s daddy, and I didn’t want her to discover this via internet! I’ve now told her, and she’s incredibly accepting, so, thanks ma!

There are some more Skye photos and just to prove that Edie’s still being cute, there’s a gallery with pics of her playing with her friend Sam.

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When I picked Edie up from playschool today she was drawing these pictures. They’re the first pictures of Edie where you can clearly (well, where I can clearly) see what they are of. I’m so proud!!

Oh, and an aside: our friend Pierre is cooking tonight, but when I told Edie she said: “Noooo! Pierre can’t cook, he’s not the daddy! You must cook, you’re the daddy!” Heh…

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Skye’s home, as of this afternoon, and we’re very happy to be finished with the hospital and all of its nonsensical beaurocracy!

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Here are photos from visiting time with Skye today. Being a silly person, I still didn’t get the photos from Rebecca’s phone, I’ll do that tomorrow.

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Skye Nomvuyo Pointer was born at 8.44am this morning by caeserian section. She weighs 4.4 kgs, and was covered in vernix, but very pink (as you can see in this first photo). Edie’s thrilled to have a little sister, and likes stroking her. She was quite stunned by the amount of hair Skye’s got (Edie was totally bald when born) - she wasn’t the only surprised one!

I’ve only got one photo online at the moment… note to self: always check that there’s memory available on the camera before going to the hospital!!

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Today is ‘Movie Star Day’ at Edie’s creche… its part of their holiday programme… anyway, so we bought a set of wings and a wand for Edie to combine with her Tinkerbell skirt, since she really loves faeries and that kind of stuff. We were a bit nervous, because she was at first a bit miffed that she wouldn’t look exactly like Tinkerbell (green dress, green shoes, yellow hair), but it seems to have gone down well in the end. So here’s a video of her in her outfit, in Windows Media format, as Quicktime movie or even in SVCD-style MPEG format, or click on the photo to be taken to the photo gallery.