Bonteboks and Boys

I will finally have to accept that I have no sixth sense about gender and shelve my list of girl’s names (again) since a scan last week showed a healthy boy.  The Ginger Prince’s latest comment on the whole business was “I don’t want a brother” so it’s good to know he’s not sitting on the fence.

                 It is clearly whale season in more ways than one this October. At 22 weeks I look and feel as I did at seven months with TGP so have an affinity with the huge humpback whales still regularly spotted near our coast. These beasts have, however, recently received second billing to their more toothsome cousins the Great White Sharks who have been putting an ominous fin up in False Bay lately following a notorious incident about three weeks ago when a British ex-pat lost part of both legs after ignoring a warning to stay out of the water. This has been (very) bad for him, bad for Muizenberg surf-tourism and bad for the morale of all our forth-coming visitors who have united in vowing not to even look at the water whilst they are here.

           In the weeks since I have stopped being sick we have managed to tick off a few major items on our ‘to do’ list. I am no longer a patient of Dr Sinister and have met with a midwife who will see me through the rest of the pregnancy. Should anything untoward happen at delivery I have a back-up doctor who describes himself as ‘pro-natural birth’ rather than ‘pro-caesarean’ as seems to be the norm in private medicine here, bringing the caesarean rate up to 70%. Seems everyone is pro-something here and at least he seems better than the last.

          We have also bought an old Dutch house in Muizenberg village one street away from where we are currently living. Having been rented for around twenty years it has been the recent home to some thirty budgies in a giant ramshackle aviary, a dog that has claimed total rights to the garden and a man who has the worst personal habits imaginable, so it is in need of some love, paint and a whole lot of cleaning. After the predictable delays and complications we are hoping to get the keys on Monday and once the fumigators have been I think we will be happy there. I am hugely excited about living in a house with a proper garden for the first time since I was ten and it will be nice for TGP to have accessible insects to pester, mud to jump in and a bigger house to make a mess of. Perhaps it will even compensate for a little brother.

                To make the most of the good weather, the second trimester and the last opportunity before being swamped in muslin squares and sterilisers we are making an effort to do more activities in and around Cape Town. We took a boat trip to Seal Island from Simon’s Town, went to a fancy restaurant in de Waterkant specialising in dumplings as a birthday surprise for me  and had our first foray into local theatre at Kalk Bay Theatre a tiny converted church with an intimate audience of about twenty. We also took TGP camping in the Cederberg Mountains where we stayed in a picturesque campsite with a huge panorama of blue-green mountains and a big spider that kept glaring at me from the back of the toilet door. My days of therma-rests and pot noodles being well and truly over we packed the car up with a blow up mattress and a travel cot for James and worked our way through the food we had brought, until a huge male baboon ran away with TGP’s breakfast whilst he was getting changed in the tent.

More recently we went with AA’s parents, the first of our summer guests, to Wilderness the first major stop on the garden route, where we stayed in a log cabin in the National Park. It was beautiful, especially canoeing through the indigenous forest, but a very long way so our stop offs included  Bontebok National Park named after its friendly antelopes that come snooping amongst the chalets in the morning, and Albertina for lunch on the way back. Albertina is a one-horse town the charm of which wore off during the hour and a half we waited for our toasted sandwiches. By standing still and looking both ways down the dusty main drag you feel you’ve really seen it all and the best thing I can say about it is that if you ever visit it will make you appreciate wherever you live.

So keep your fingers crossed for us on Monday as I hope to get the keys to our new house, have my first pregnancy appointment since July and somehow fashion TGP into a ginger Dracula for a Muizenberg Halloween parade. Apart from a house move November is due to bring us hotter weather and some specially delivered company for The Ginger Prince in the form of The Ginger Princess, his second cousin, winging her way over from Manchester. There will be two of them. Watch out Cape Town.

Halloween Update...

We got our keys to the new place today and our Halloween treats were that the house was bigger than we remembered, with the potential to be lovely. Our Halloween tricks, however, included;

1 x dead rat (in the old aviary in which the many budgies used to live)
Lots x live mice (also in the old aviary)
1 x tenant (+ great big bear-like dog of tenant) still in the process of moving out as we arrived to take possession of the house (hopefully leaving even as I write this)
Lots x pieces of broken furnature and filthy dirty pots and pans left here

So Happy Halloween everyone!!