Thursday, September 25, 2008

Holiday 9/24

Today there was a national holiday, Heritage Day, I believe. I don't really know for sure, because no one that we asked actually knew either. It really didn't affect us much, except that Amos wasn't here. All day long Jori asked where he was. We weren't planning on going anywhere today, which was good because many places would have been closed.

After breakfast, we took the kids for a walk around the property. We definitely need to build up their stamina if we plan on doing that again. We hadn't gone far and they were already crying to be carried. Tyson did finally get interested in looking at the big cactus plants, but Jori wasn't having much fun. We headed back to the house for cold drinks and some cookies. Then the kids went off and played together for a long time. They found some water to play in, which was quite fun, and it kept them occupied for quite a while. They also pretended to hunt for hornbills, “booka-booka” birds, and meetah birds. In case you're wondering, hornbills are real, “booka-booka” is the sound that one of the birds here makes, hence the name Tyson gave it, and the meetah is a bird from our Oswald DVD. They had a lot of fun.

It has been much warmer here the past couple days, so Tyson and Jori were both pretty tired after lunch. They took long naps while Darin worked hard to beat Level 7 of Zuma and I read the last Reader's Digest from home. I also played with Tyson's Leapster video game for a while. He has a game called Pet Pals that I got quite good at. Now I can teach Tyson the tricks of the game.

After the kids woke up, we decided to drive over to Tamboti to take another walk. Again, the kids were not super thrilled. Jori actually marched along pretty happily, but Tyson kept saying “can we go back now?”, so after a little while we found a table to rest at and had some pop to cool off. While we were sitting there, a warthog came out of the “woods” and was eating grass in front of us. Derrick had mentioned at a prior visit that a pregnant warthog has claimed his lawn for her afternoon meal time, but we hadn't seen her before today. Tyson and Jori both thought it was pretty neat that a warthog was so close to where we were sitting, but they grew tired of that too after a little while.

We left Tamboti and headed back to TYB to borrow some DVD's. When we got there, they were just getting ready to head out on a tractor ride, so we hopped in the back of the trailer with all the kids and volunteers. There were a lot of us in the trailer, which made for a hot, sticky, uncomfortable ride, especially for the adults. Mark took us for quite a long ride. We saw quite a few bok, including some varieties we hadn't seen before. It was a nice way to end the afternoon. We hung around TYB long enough for Darin to hurt Jori's leg on the trampoline. She's ok, but for a while, he thought we would be heading out to find a doctor.

For dinner, we decided to have pizza and watch a movie with the kids. We borrowed Chicken Little from across the road, and they both seemed to like it. At 7, we put them both to bed and then decided to watch Calendar Girls. That brought us to the very late hour of 9 pm, so I decided to go to bed.

So ends another day in South Africa.

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