Chocolachillie

We’ve got to move in 23 days and I’m still waiting for a quotation from the moving company. (Edited to add: received it and it isn’t nearly as expensive as I thought! Yay!) We’ve started sorting out things. The four hot spots in the house are the study, the laundry, the store room and the medicine cupboard.

Dirk tackled the study this weekend and I tried to clear the top cupboard in the spare room. We’re both not nearly done, but at least we’ve made some headway. Our stuff falls into roughly two categories:

Things we thought were lost and have now gleefully found.
Things we weren’t really looking for and are now very sorry we found.

Into the first category fall things like Loren’s ultrasound printouts, a lucky packet version of Speed MacQueen (lost for over a year and with typical toddler singlemindedness never forgotten) and my embroidery frame. The latter consists of stacks of magazines, music tapes and unlabelled video tapes, unfinished needlework projects and baby clothes that Magnus has just outgrown. Not to mention boxes full of paperwork that we have to keep according to law.

Keeping toys under control is an ongoing battle. My father made us a cupboard of three meters long that contained the toys for a while. After that too started overflowing, I bought large plastic boxes with lids and sorted the toys into them. All art materials go into one, all Lego blocks in another, dinky cars are separated from bath toys etc. While I was on maternity leave I kept this in some order. I allowed one box at a time out of the cupboard and it had to be replaced before another one could be taken out. I’m by no means a perfectionist – not like a friend of mine who counts the pieces of her child’s pegboard before it gets stored! But this seems to work as Marco can see at a glance what is there, he learns to do one thing at a time (and will hopefully not unearth a half-knitted jersey 10 years after he started it, like his mother…)

Ever since I returned to work I’ve spent a chunk of every weekend fishing crayons from the puzzle box, returning caps to pens, digging too small Lego blocks from the baby toy box and looking for pieces of a puzzle all over the house. I gripe and get angry, but by Monday I’ve cooled down enough to completely forget about it again. Occasionally I’ll drop hints and get ignored like a stop street. I’m not proposing that they do all the cleaning up after Marco all by themselves. He’s old enough to learn to look after his things. But a four-year-old is certainly not going to do it without some adult guidance.

I realize that South Africans are very lucky in that they can afford staff. In fact, this is one of the main things many South Africans living overseas seem to miss. Here even relatively poor people have somebody come in to clean and do the washing.

We are extremely fortunate to have people like Anna and Jenny work for us. They are honest and hardworking and they really care about us. They’ve been with us through the most difficult periods of our lives and they have been nothing but supportive. But as with anybody working closely together, familiarity breeds contempt eventually. Irritations include the sugar bowl that gets emptied and is left for Dirk to refill since he’s the only one of us taking sugar in his coffee. Or the outside sitting areas that seem to have become no man’s land since they are never cleaned. Dirty nappies that are not noticed, causing sore bums. Marco being dressed in Magnus’ pants, because they were his and three years down the line they are expected to still fit him. Dirt above eye level getting ignored. Milk spilt in the microwave left for me to clean up. Small things, yes, but IRRITATING THE HELL OUT OF US.

And on their side I can only guess at the many many things that I’m sure annoys them about us. Like Marco being sassy, cleaning the same surfaces day after day, being picked up late to go to the taxi. Like doing something very kind and I’m too absorbed to notice…

Maybe we do need to go our separate ways, sad though it may be.

We’ve found work for Jenny, but are still looking for Anna. She went for an interview with the CP Association last week for a job at a special needs school as a physiotherapist’s assistant. She didn’t get the job, but I suspect that she blew the interview. For the following reasons:
1. It is only a half day job, paying less than she currently earns monthly. But working it out on an hourly rate, it actually pays far better. Plus she would have had school holidays and weekends during which she could have freelanced.
2. She is supposed to work in pants, which her husband doesn’t like. (!)
3. She would have had to start next week leaving us without a child minder for two weeks on Tuesdays only. Which was no problem as far as I’m concerned. We would have made a plan.
Even though I really wanted her to get the job, I have to accept that it is, after all, her choice where she wants to work. I just don’t want to think of her battling financially, that’s all.