Tri's and braais

So life is good here in SA. My mum is up from the Cape for a visit and Nico is now officially settled at school. They said it would take 3 weeks and at exactly 3 weeks to the day he started really having fun at school, joining in with the others, and not crying when I dropped him off, getting involved in the baking and the art activities, and generally not just gluing himself to his teacher.
He has a new teacher, Kim, she is lovely. She looks a little like my sister, who is now Nico's second mum, so he LOVES Teacher kim. And she LOVES Nico! She really has taken him under her wing. Apparently she is like the pied piper at school, with 3 little ones: Nico, Cara (her daughter) and another little girl, Katja, following her everywhere.
He also doesn't need his lion anymore. For his first 3 weeks he dragged it around with him everywhere. It was real comfort for him at school. It was so cute seeing him clutching his lion in a strangle hold! He does love it. He growls every time he picks it up. And he even hugs and kisses it. But thankfully, he can easily live without it.
So I am happy because it was horrible dropping off Nico every morning and he just WAILED and tried to cling to me. Now he is a happy school boy, he even says 'school is cool' (if you know his language)

Nico has also developed quite a bit in these last few weeks. Physically and mentally. He now rides his motorbike like a pro, whizzing around and taking the corners at speed. He can swing from things now, so holds his own weight. He climbs EVERYTHING and anything and has had some falls at school apparently. He is talking a lot more and repeats things with much more clarity. He says 'please' or 'bitte' after we insist he says it, instead of his usual, demanding 'more'.

He is also trying VERY hard to jump off the ground with both feet... he just can't quite work out the co-ordination. One leg goes up and the other follows after, but he's yet to do them together. He tries for about 10 minutes though. Which is REALLY long for a toddler to do anything! Soon after the jumping game he will turn round and round and round and round on the spot making himself awfully dizzy. These games are often before bath time, in what we call his happy (crazy) hour. I think he gets extra excited cos Dad is home by then.

Another funny thing he does is call Mahindi 'Mahindi', but he calls Horse, 'Bad Girl'. Just shows how often we are shouting at Horse!

Nico is absolutely key befok. He is always wanting to play with them and hold them and try every key in every door. His obsession is getting very annoying. He goes around saying 'KKKKKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYY' and then 'KEEEEEEEEYYYYYY DOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRR' and then 'CAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR KEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYY'. And apparently you are to drop everything and help him get keys in the locks. My mum bought up a whole bunch of random spare keys so at least now we don't have to worry about him losing every key for the house.

Our nightmare move from Kenya!

Before I continue on our South African chapter, I must just write about our Move From Hell that we experienced during our last 3 days in Nairobi. We had been forced to use a certain move company because Benedikt's new company had ties with them. Right from the beginning this made me anxious as I know how many things can go wrong if you don't have the right people helping you.
So the packers from said company arrived on the Wednesday, 2 hours late of course. And they started packing. SLOWLY. Joseph, their leader who had come 2 weeks prior to do an assessment on the house assured me that they would finish that day with the packing. Looking at the guys doing the cutting, wrapping, boxing, and taping I was like, WHATEVER.
They were like snails. And there was only 4 guys. Granted, yes, we had sold 50% of our stuff, but we still had enough goods to fill a 20 foot container, so it was a lot. So at the end of the day he admitted they would need to come back the following day. So again, on Thursday, they arrived LATE, and slowly got started on packing the remaining items. Benedikt and I, during those 2 days packed the entire upstairs contents ourselves! Come Friday, they still had about 20% of things to pack/wrap and it was 12 noon before they even arrived! This was our last day in Kenya and we were getting just a tad bit stressed.
Friday, being D-day, meant that we had a few friends dropping by to say goodbye. Plus various people picking up my car, the microwave, our bed and its accompaniments, our fridge and our alien ID's (these are very useful for visitors who want to pay resident rates!) respectively. So at any given time, there was a few extra people there besides the packers. Plus our housekeeper and nanny, who were both GREAT in helping us with cleaning, sorting and looking after Nico. (Nico hardly slept a wink that day as his room was packed up, poor thing)
So, on top of all that choas, my good friend Eva, who was moving into our house, who HAD to be out of her house that day, had to move in! So her people were there dropping off things to the garden and installing her fridge and washing machine and dstv etc. Basically as soon as we declared a room empty, she would move stuff in. So ZERO turn around time! And I'd say at the peak of the chaos, there were about 25 people at our place moving bits of furniture in different directions!
So crunch time came and it was time to pack the trucks. Which was a last minute change as our move company (or rather the group of useless people who calls themselves a company) told us on Friday morning that they couldn't load our container directly and that they would take our stuff to the airport via truck and load the container there. Without us being present at the re-loading. ie. Half our stuff would go missing when they moved it from the trucks to the container and the other half of it would be packed so badly it would break during transport. To me, those were now a given.
I felt immediate sadness for all the personal effects we were bound to lose. Like things my granny gave me, or photo albums and books. And all the special items we'd bought in Kenya. The things like our crockery and sofa and rugs and camping equipment is easy to replace and we have a good insurance. But its the personal things like wedding presents and framed photos that we will be sad about. We will only really know how much they messed up when we get to Zurich in a few months time and take our stuff out of storage. We are not going to think of it between now and then, its pointless.

So anyway, it was time to load our stuff, with air freight going off first. So I took photos of the air freight items and wrote a list of what was going. As they started loading the truck we asked where the packing list was... they pointed to me and said she is writing it down and that they would get a copy. We were like WHAT?!!!!!!!!!
I was hand writing on a random piece of paper and they wanted a COPY?!! And we were to write our OWN packing lists?!!! How completely dodgy and unprofessional. We were shocked actually!!
So for the next 2 hours, Benedikt and I had to be there as they loaded the trucks and write down (in duplicate) what was going on, with its number and contents. What shambles.
Nico chose that moment to wake up, we couldn't blame him, with all the noise and no curtains or anything in his room. So there we were, trying to keep close tabs on what was being loaded, while keeping an eye on Nico, and facilitating all the people picking up beds and cars etc. Nico managed to find a red felt tip pen at the same time and draw on all the walls!!
WHAT A NIGHTMARE.
And I am convinced we won't see our belongings again.