Busy Days and Sleepless Nights: Bunking With My Hooligan

For my sins, I have never been a good sleeper.  The interior of my skull is a noisy place, and it is seldom that I am able to ignore the noise sufficiently to put together 8 contiguous hours of sleep.  From a child-rearing point of view, this is fantastic, because every parent in the world has entered into the unwritten agreement with their children that sleep is a thing of the past, banished to the same realm as dinner in quiet restaurants and furniture not decorated with brown handprints.  While my son is not as bad as some of the protagonists of horror stories I have heard from friends and colleagues, when he decides sleep is simply not part of his schedule, he certainly sticks to that decision.

Never was this more evident than the recent holiday I took with my wife and son to the majestic Natal Midlands.  For my wife and I, this was to be four days of bliss in (Relative) silence in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.  For my 2-year-old son Ricky, however, this was a whole new set of shit to climb on and break and explore and drag into the house and put in his mouth and break some more.  I have never seen him as turnt up as he was during this holiday, and his normally endless reservoir of energy seemed even more endless, like some ungodly perpetual motion machine.  You would think that all that activity would tucker him out, but no sirree, when bedtime rolled around the little bugger was just as amped as ever.

Ricky's First Holiday {In Pictures}

On the 26th of February Rod and I had officially been together for ten years. To mark the occasion we thought we'd take a trip back to the Midlands where Rod had proposed five years earlier. We also thought it would be the perfect place for Ricky's first holiday, since we had yet to take a family trip after his birth nearly two years ago! The Midlands is a beautiful part of our diverse country, and definitely one of my favourite places to holiday, and the endless green proved popular with our little man who ran around like a crazy person, exploring every nook and cranny. We booked a cottage at Caversham Mill for three nights, and were told upon arrival that we had been moved to a bigger cottage. Our "backyard" led right down to the Lions River, with beautiful views stretching across miles of endless green. I didn't object. 

On the second day we ventured into Pietermaritzburg to visit my Grammy before heading into Durban for a couple hours. My aunt Anne lives in Durbs, so we met up with her for a coffee and a catch up on the promenade before letting Ricky barrel head first into the ocean. If there are two things that Ricky loves, it's sand and water, so he was in hog heaven! We didn't even have a chance to change him into his cozzie before he was waist deep in waves, so we just let him at it. I was quite impressed with his boldness; not once did he cry or run (except into the sea), and when a big wave took his feet out from under him, he just laughed and stood up for more. Needless to say, his battery was flattened by such a busy day and he slept like a log.