All My Children

Most normal families look forward to Sundays as the traditional day of rest and/or recreation. Not my family.

This, of course, is perfectly natural. Face it: we are not what you would call a normal family.

For us, Sunday is just another working day; the day my wife the estate agent has to go out to work while I, fresh from a week of feet-on-the-office desk refuge from domestic strife, must revert once more to my role as a full-time househusband responsible for the care, feeding, control, cleaning, rescue and entertainment of an ever-increasing menagerie of diverse domestic life-forms. To wit … Continue Reading »

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted …

It’s a girl!

Healthy (she has all 20 requisite digits), lusty (she cries louder than an Italian mama at a family wedding), rosy-cheeked, pink-skinned, (you were expecting olive-green, perhaps?), almond-eyed, raven-haired (all seven of them) Irish-South African beauty; born November 10 at Westville Hospital near Durban; a bonny, bouncing (father dropped her on the carpet) sister for Alexandra and Kendall, source of curious concern for eight household pets, and cause of great wonderment for proud father … as in: “I wonder how I’m going to pay for all this.”

Mother and child well; father recuperating as well as can be expected.

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I myself think that the teen years up to sixteen, seventeen or eighteen are generally the time for an informal kind of companionship between boys and girls, mainly in groups.

You get lots of opportunities to learn about the opposite sex and your own sex by being with other young people regularly in school, in Sunday School, in camps, around the neighbourhood, in dropping in and out of other families‘ homes. This kind of sociability allows you to get to know others casually, which is the most comfortable way for most early adolescents. You can talk as much or as little as you feel like doing, instead of having to fill up all the silences, the way you feel you have to do when there are only two people present. You can be on school and youth club committees to carry out projects and social activities. You can participate in the activity clubs that exist in many schools—a Spanish club, a stamp collectors’ club, a nature- study club, etc. Continue Reading »