Butterfly World

Paula accompanied Joel and his class on their first school trip today to Butterfly World in Paarl. He had an absolute ball - firstly riding in the car with one of his new friends, Pabatso, who is a Sotho speaker solely and yet manages to get by in an English speaking nursery - aren't kids amazing!! He was then treated to up close and personal experiences (a) with the butterflies themselves in a wonderfully humid and hot enclosed area, and then with a couple of snakes and (thankfully!) some enclosed tarantulas and other such "lovelies".

Valentines Day

Joel's school emailed this photo to us. For Valentines Day the kids were allowed to ditch the uniform and wear red & white (so some went in blue & white!). Joel doesn't look too chuffed by the whole thing. The kids are from both his nursery class and the reception class.

Sadly the reception class teacher wore a Man Ure shirt but luckily she's not in the photo, phew!

Picture Resizer

Here's a really useful utility from Microsoft. In fact, this is so useful that you can almost forgive Microsoft all their previous sins.

If you regularly post photos on a Blog or website this utility is for you!

Getting Fit - Mountain Biking

I've been making a serious effort to shake off a few kilos and get fit in the process, but I also want to have fun whilst doing this. That means the gym is a non starter! So I've been mountain biking on and off for a couple of years now and really enjoyed it, but late last year the group I was riding with let me down. I chased them for a while but had to concede defeat as they were all too busy with their own businesses to commit to regular riding.

Chris Nissen Update

We've not posted on the Blog for a few days as we never seem to find the time or when we do we're just too tired to say anything worth writing.

Family life continues to be great, both boys are blossoming at their respective nurseries. Joel astounds us by the day with what he's learning. He comes out with some real pearls of wisdom and often has us cracked up. Eli loves going to his nursery/crèche run by Leanne, a friend from church. He's supposed to be moving at Easter to the same nursery Joel went to but given how happy he is we're reconsidering the move.

Home Affairs - Residency

We started the process of applying for permanent residence this morning and so embarked upon a long and slow journey with Home affairs which could take up to 3 years to complete! Hopefully things will go a bit quicker than that as we're applying on kinship grounds and as such the paperwork we have to provide is very minimal.

Lazy Weekend

It's the weekend so that must mean it's time for the paddling pool - again! As is very evident, the boys adore the pool and have so much fun in there. Eli soon had enough and decided that he wanted to climb so had a go on the climbing frame. He struggled with the rope side but shinned straight up the ladder side much to our horror! Eli was immensely pleased with himself so there'll be no end of him climbing now.

Three of the best piccys can be seen at Finnie's in Focus

Cape Town Aquarium

After a long but fun week at school Joel asked if we could go to the aquarium on Saturday, so we did. Joel adores the place and Eli is developing a passion for it too which is brilliant. As ever we had a great morning, taking in all the tanks especially the sharks, crabs & lobsters followed by the touch tank and the children's activity centre where they both enjoyed the puppet show and Joel made an octopus! We've been members of the aquarium for almost 3 years and it really is well worth it!

Bible Study

We had an excellent bible study on Thursday. We were looking at Daniel 6 (we're slowly working our way through the whole book) and had an excellent discussion at the end about our faith and whether our neighbours, colleagues etc are aware that we serve the living God 'continually' as Daniel did. Darius recognised Daniel's faith so why shouldn't others recognise our faith? We all felt positively challenged which is great and hopefully we'll see some fruit in our lives as we witness to those around us.

Emyezweni Pre-School

One of the joys of my work is that I get to spend time with a wide variety of people in a wide variety of contexts. One of the best contexts is Emyezweni Pre-School which is run by Debs & Rach as part of HCC's outreach into Lwandle. This morning I took my laptop and projector and played Cars for the kids. Needless to say the film was a huge hit.

The boy in the foreground in the check shirt was riveted

Paddling Pool

We had a fairly lazy weekend and spent quite a bit of time around the paddling pool particularly on Sunday. The weather was great with the temperature in the high 20's rather than low 30's so it was quite comfortable. On Saturday we went to the Nature Reserve (sadly the camera battery died) and had a lovely morning feeding the ducks and trying to coax Spikey the porcupine out of his house, with no success.