the adlards

Yesterday was a lovely day. A cold and rainy inside-day, just right for playing with Lego, building puzzles and watching Peppa Pig. And watching Peppa Pig. And watching Peppa Pig.

Sophie’s a wonderful little girl and watching her enjoy her birthday was a joy.

Dialogue of the day:
“Dad, that’s a really big one”
“Jo, if I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that …”
“Then you’d buy a bigger one, wouldn’t you Dad?”

I mean, where do you go from there? Seriously.

We have a P..P..Pigeon Problem. Well, not so much us as our bird-brained but rather dear dog, Ruby.

A couple of weeks back we woke – two mornings in a row – to find that Ruby had mined the area around the beanbag she sleeps on. She’d taken the added precaution of ensuring the deterent was of a consistency that gradually spread itself evenly over the floor. Both mornings, fortunately, we switched the lights on before entering the room. Nuff said.

We adopted a two-pronged remedial approach: we changed her diet immediately and started feeding her in the morning. The first measure she took to just fine, but the second change has failed. Entirely. She runs to the front door to go out in the morning, looking famished, then watches the pigeons eat the food out of her bowl. She begs again mid-afternoon and does the same. After dark (no pigeons) she repeats the process and eats her food. I put it down to idiocy for a while (hers) and persevered in the hope she would suddenly realise that breakfast was better than dinner – specially if there’s no dinner to be had. I now think it may be something other than idiocy (hers).

She really has driven the argument far beyond the realm of what might be considered reasonable. If I walk outside at any time of day, turn and look back at the house, my eyes are met by the hopeful cocked-head stares of clans of hopeful pigeons lining the apex of the roof and the gutters. It’s a little freaky. Really.

Now there are a few things to note here:
1. She’s beaten us
2. Either she’s terrified of pigeons or a completely selfless philanthropist
3. She is almost certainly a supreme canine strategist
4. She’s beaten us

We’ll feed her after dark from now on, but if she soils the floor we will close her in a kennel full of pigeons with a single dog biscuit until she taps out. If reality TV can do it, so can we.

(and if we may say so too) … we wouldn’t be us if it wasn’t for you.

Happy Mother’s Day!

It’s a corker. A hint of Autumn chill despite being 20-some degrees. Just a teeny bit of work to do, otherwise treehouse building.

We spoke to the doc’s office yesterday and need to wait another 3 weeks for Sophie’s results

Very serious sense of humour loss yesterday, better today. And hey, it’s party season! Fancy-dress this afternoon ..

My car is cute. My car is satisfyingly, counter-culturally compact. The longer I live in South Africa the stronger the impulse to park my car out of sight and walk the last few hundred yards to meetings.

For the past few weeks my car’s home has been under a fig tree in the yard. Today it looks like a fig-eating bird has ingested it and then passed it. Even though I drove really really fast to my meeting this afternoon (to try to blow it clean), it still looked like a sort of smallish, coarse-grained dinosaur dropping between the two shiny BMWs at the investment bank.

So now my car is counter-culturally compact and stop-and-stare dirty. It’s a stereotype breaker, my car. I’d wash it if it wasn’t such a powerful statement.

Josie had her sixth birthday party yesterday. Six. Good grief. It was great, thanks entirely to MGW.

There were cutout figures of Buzz Lightyear and a Space Princess to have pictures taken with, a hunt for moon rocks and a space kitten that arrived in its own spaceship and needed rescuing. Jo and the kitten have been inseperable since. The kitten travels on the end of a leash, stuffed into a shoe which is fitted to a roller skate. Not a real kitten, you understand.

Kids parties completely freak me out. I’m of some use at the decorating-the-party-room stage, but the event is too much for me. Something about organised activities and pre-schoolers. Is that not an absolute contradiction?

Josie loved her party and spent some time on the phone afterwards telling everyone all about it.

“The reserve offers the visitor some of the most striking scenery in the Karoo as well as fascinating animals and plants that comes to life on the back of a horse.”

… but I have more pressing things to think about just now.

On Monday we went to Kirstenbosch to meet up with … uhh … let’s just say Mr & Mrs Smith.
It was fun to catch up with Patrick and Dallah and little Samuel.

It’s been a good day. Presents and baked cheesecake and scones with jam and cream and family and snuggly winter stay-huddled-inside weather in the morning with sunny winter go-for-a-walk weather in the afternoon.

Luverly.

There’s no tea quite as good as hospital tea. When the Sister came in at 5am yesterday I was sleeping on my camp mat on the floor of Sophie’s room (she had the candour to laugh once her eyes had adjusted to the dark). If you need to wake up in that situation there’s not a better way to do it.

After the manic sedation-related behaviour of Thursday evening, Friday was relatively calm. Sophie was badly affected by the sedative all day on Friday. On Thursday she was happily doing all her puzzles, on Friday she could just manage the big four-piece ones. She also couldn’t walk, which is perhaps the better measure of sedation, and was very sad and weepy. It’s very difficult seeing your little girl struggling like that. She’s slept for at least half of the last 24 hours and is much better now.

The blood for testing was supposed to be drawn between the MRI and wiring up on Thursday, but because that dragged on pretty late there were no pathology drivers available when the time came, so bloods were to be done on Friday while Sophie was sedated for removal of the electrodes. Probably unsurprisingly, there was some missing co-ordination and we wound up having to take 12 vials of blood for testing while Sophie was wide awake. Being held down by her Mum & Dad. Nice.

Blood samples have gone to labs at Constantiaberg, Palotti, Red Cross Childrens Hospital and some overseas. Results should trickle in over the next two weeks or so.

The humour highlight of our visit was without question the electrode removal … so blood had been taken and everyone (everyone who wasn’t staff) was a little shaken, when in comes a nurse sent to remove the electrodes from Sophie’s scalp. She sort of hovers over Sophie for a few seconds, then says, “I don’t think I’ll just pull them off, it looks like it might hurt.”
So help me.
It’s true.
To her eternal credit, while my jaw was still on the floor, MGW calmly looked at her and said, “Ummm, usually they put something on them first to dissolve the glue.” After a brief period of consultation, the nurse reappeared with gloves, swabs and acetone. She had a stab and concluded that we’d need to sedate. I had her leave her tools in the room.

We didn’t want Sophie sedated again just to remove the electrodes so Michelle & I did it ourselves. Just like last time. The trick is to do the minimum possible to remove the electrodes. This takes some time. Acetone stinks, is freezing on the skin because it evaporates before you have a chance to actually do anything with it, is toxic and can bring on seizures, and doesn’t actually do the job very well. When the electrodes are off, the glue on Sophie’s scalp is still very much in place. It’ll take a month to get the 20-odd blobs off and out of her hair bit by bit.

It is very good to have her home and see her smiling again today (and doing puzzles). And eating sausage.