Rhythm or Lack Thereof

EeCheng left after her two week visit, and we find ourselves possibly-maybe-maybe settling into some kind of rhythm. No. I'm not being honest. We don't have much of a rhythm. The advantage of not having proper day jobs is that we can decide each day what we feel like accomplishing. The disadvantage is that we are not grounded by knowing what's ahead of us- which is sometimes important for tiny kiddies.

Right now, I have my day's tasks and there are things that aren't going to get done, but it's ok. I have done a little work, given a lot of kisses, tried not to scream at my screaming 2-year-old, and right this moment I need to tell you that Noah gave back the iPod before the battery died. [Sorry, I'm gloating. Unlimited Kipper is somehow working- Noah no longer watches it much. Now if only he'd get over chocolate.] 

We've had major life events almost every week for about a year. There's still a lot to be done in terms of our settling into life here in Cape Town. I still haven't bought car insurance, house insurance, called the electrician to ask about the power failures, applied for Eug's permanent residence, got my proposal through Human Research Ethics, put up photos on our walls or fixed our living room light fixture. [Please God don't let the house burn down]. Overall, those things are relatively minor. I feel like there's nothing standing between me and Real Life. This is it. And we have enough time. We have the same amount of time as everyone.

I think sometimes I use landmarks to stop me from working on things- "it'll be better when..." Despite our best efforts, our house is always a mess. We always have one more load of diapers. I always forget to pay the Telkom bill until the last minute. Rather than think that a solution will appear some magical moment in the future, it seems to help to acknowledge that this is our life right now. This is it. If things aren't working now, then it's good to find tiny, stepwise solutions for them, to the extent possible. Solutions for low bar stuff- avoiding swarms of fruit flies, remembering to clean the sheet if Noah pees on it in the night, not running out of clothes or smelling bad. We're not yet at exercise, pretty toddler room decorations, painting the outside walls. Those are for next month or next year.

That said, here are some cool, unrelated things from the last week:

• Soap nuts. Homemade detergent without borax sort of doesn't work for us. So I ordered soap nuts and borax from the internet and asked EeCheng to bring them over to us. The borax didn't arrive in time but the soap nuts did, and they are awesome. We haven't had time to strip the diapers of detergent in a while, and were having leakage problems. No longer. I think the soap nuts have very little residue. Soap nuts can also be purchased from Wellness Warehouse in Cape Town, but if you're in the U.S. revel in the fact that you have Amazon. It's a precious, precious resource.
• The lovely Sammi Taylor wrote a piece for Brett on Singleness, and I just wanted to give her a shout out. Check it out! Brett is spending some time with The Simple Way, a group I've spoken about here a few times.
• Check out Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention for mid-week inspiration. There is much I don't know about politics. But I saw substantive positive changes working in a U.S. government job under Obama. Despite deep cuts to the Public Health Budget, money became available in parts of my work that really seemed to have an impact.  
• I have access to an old giant 240L bin to convert to a worm bin! Watch this space to see a tutorial on how to do this. [uh...if you have any ideas on how best to do this, please tell me.] We've been overwhelming our current farm, so I'm excited to increase our volume of scraps, and maybe even become a source of vermicompost in our neighborhood.