no wonder I'm tired.

On Friday morning, we went to town, all 4 of us, to do our weekly shopping.  Which also combined shopping for the College, picking up one of our local Trustees who need a tire repaired, stopping at the bank, etc.  It took more than 4 hours, in the end.  4 hours in the blazing sunshine hopping in and out of hot, crowded shops will wear you out!

This is what the rest of the day looked like other than shopping...  Elijah tried to chew through a power cord, used his yogurt for finger-painting, plastered his breakfast (Weetabix) all over his hair, tried to bite a chunk out of his sandal, peed through his cloth diaper, sat on the package of light bulbs we had just bought, threw lemons down the kitchen steps because he thought they were balls, tried to pick Ketzia up and managed to pull her out of her car seat (but I caught her before her head hit the floor), kicked the cucumber I bought in the market across the kitchen floor because it looked like a footballl, and demonstrated in many other ways that he is nearly 2 years old... 

He has also been getting up at the crack of dawn (almost precisely 5:30) every morning. Which makes us doubly and triply thankful that Ketzia sleeps so well, because otherwise we would be really suffering for sleep!  As it is, we are getting enough to function but rise-and-shine with our wired little guy still seems brutally early....

In other news, my mobile phone is inexplicably dying and will need to be replaced, we have a bees' nest in our roof which needs to be removed, the huge pit-which-was-intended-to-be-a-swimming-pool in our garden is almost filled back up with dirt again (thanks to the hard work of our students who are getting paid for this) and no longer threatens Elijah's safety every time he goes near it, one of our dogs ate Elijah's lunch today and has been banned from the house for a week as a result, my children seem to schedule at least one "synchronized screaming" event every day, we are still desperately trying to find a way to get the furniture we are trying to buy from Kabwe to Lusaka sometime in the next 1-2 weeks or else it will be sold to someone else, I have pretty much given up on cloth nappies with Elijah since he is 30+ lbs and no cloth nappies seem to be designed for a boy his size and we will now use disposables for him (cloth for Ketzia) and soon switch to toilet-training mode... and it is time for bed.