Bye bye birdie!

Okay, I think I need to accept that I'm only going to blog once a fortnight now. That way I can stop stressing about it.

We're settling in nicely, I guess. I'd forgotten how hectic Cape Town is, or maybe that's just because we have a toddler who is so busy, busy, busy and always wants you to do stuff with her. Not that I'm complaining! Far from it. Today, for the first time in months, Mommy was flavour of the month again. YAY!! All day long she has been hanging onto my jeans, asking me to pick her up, asking me to play with her - she even wanted MOMMY to push the swing this morning, not Daddy. And then, best of all, she crawled into my lap this afternoon while we were visiting her godparents to fall asleep. What a privilege and blessing! I lapped up every minute of her, kissed her till I was sure she would tell me to go away, cuddled her, absorbed her smell and her smile, and basically did whatever I could to to be near her. It was heaven! My Nellie tanks are full again and it feels wonderful.

G and I have been thinking hard about which church to join, and had defaulted to our old church. However, this weekend we decided that this really is the church for us over the next year or so because we've decided to give 'Jesus Ministry' another go. This was something that our church back in London started doing a while ago - shortly after I was turned down for ordination training. We both loved it, but have found it very difficult to work through and deal with, for various reasons. We'd also seen very little change in our own lives and had seen various people hurt by it. This has had the result that we'd become disillusioned by it.

Little did we know, but our church in Cape Town has been involved in it for longer than our church back in London has been, but is implementing it in a completely different way. Talking to the key players in it, we've both found our passion for it is being rekindled. The way it is talked about here, and implemented, seems to have avoided the mistakes we'd made before. The big difference is that it is implemented in community. Community seems to be the key. So - we've decided to give it another go, and to get stuck into a community that is keen to do it, so that we can avoid the mistakes we'd made before. That means committing wholeheartedly to this church. That, in turn, means we're less likely to follow through on some of our other plans for a few years.

Since coming back, we've been trying to reconnect with friends, and I've realised why we had so much time (by comparison) for our friends back in London - we didn't have a massive clan of family to see! I love my family, and I'm thrilled to be able to see them and spend time with them, but doing so means we have less time for friends. I guess the key is just to be more organised.

And I leave you with news that we have a rat. No, not a pet. And yes, it's living in the house. It's been stealing our bread every night, and we've finally tracked it down to coming into the house via the floorboards under the kitchen cupboards. Graeme got a glimpse of it last night (after everyone else said that it couldn't possibly be a rat but had to be something bigger - like a cat, but Nicole said, no - it definitely was a rat. I should have bet on it!). So tonight my dad has put the Ratex down, and put a trap in. I hate traps and poison, but with Nellie in the house I'm not going to risk anything. Yet another reason why we're getting a cat when we move into our own place!