Now we are two...

As some of you will know The Ginger Prince turned two a week ago and is now officially a big boy. It isn’t easy to plan a treat for a boy who’s days normally include trips to the beach, sightings of Sea Lions and outings to City Farms but I thought one thing we didn’t do every day was visit the penguin colony at Boulder’s beach. AA’s students were traumatising over their statistics too much for him to take a day off so it was just me and a Ginger Prince who had already worked himself into a lather of birthday excitement before he had even got out of his pyjamas. We took a 25 minute drive down the coast through St James, Fish Hoek, Kalk Bay and the lovely Simon’s Town to Boulder’s beach with TGP in the back adding the sound effects of ‘’Choo choo’’ and ‘’Arf arf’’ in places where he had previously seen both trains and Sea Lions.

                At Seaforth, the beach next to boulders from which you walk, our parking attendant guided us to a penguin nursing a chick in a tiny space under a shed in the car park. We peered for as long as we could until the mother started angling her head and launching her beak out as though planning to give TGP’s enquiring little fingers a peck. Penguins look adorable from a distance but up close they have little beady eyes and smell strongly of fish.

Seaforth Beach is ideal for toddlers because of the natural rock pools that form at the base of the boulders. It was into just such a rock pool that I lowered a naked and wriggling Ginger Prince and it was there that he remained, splashing and shouting at sea gulls, until I spotted two penguins hopping off  another Boulder and chased them with my camera, leaving TGP to beetle along after me. Drying a sandy, wet Ginger Prince is no easy matter when at any given opportunity he will wriggle free and roll once again along the beach creating a cement-like paste of sun cream, salt and sand. Once decent I took him through the walkway that looks down on Boulder’s Beach itself, where the colony of endangered African Penguins have chosen to make their nests for decades. It is consistently strange to see a Penguin in a sea that is warm enough to swim in and especially when they are there in such vast numbers and tame enough to come right over to the barriers. TGP almost took off in excitement and even made an attempt to get through the barrier which was unsuccessful, fortunately for the penguins.

As soon as AA got home TGP opened his presents which included some exciting items from friends and relatives back home and from myself and AA a red sports car with opening doors (very manly) and a pink pram (not so very manly). His face lit up when he opened the latter, as I knew it would having seen him make a beeline for them wherever possible, and he proceeded to fill it with dinosaurs and toy trains and rabbits and then clatter manically around the living room laughing.

Ordinarily TGP will eat anything with sugar in but even he made an exception for the birthday cake I made him. It was the second cake I have made as an adult and definitely the least successful. I somehow failed to patch together the right ingredients for my recipe and then thought at the last minute I could ad-lib. Turns out ad-libbing doesn’t work so well when it comes to baking and it seems me and Google mean different things when we say ‘’Easy’’. AA tried to force it down because he felt bad for me but even he has now given up.