Taking a shower is an amusing endeavor these days. The borehole pump is broken and we have river water in our taps. Initially this was fine, the water was the colour of weak tea and you still felt like you were clean when you got done. In the past couple of weeks it has bucketed down and the river has swelled.

Now the water is more like builders tea, with leaves in it. Apparently the trick is not to use conditioner. A lesson I did not learn. The conditioner binds the mud to your hair and you are instantly blessed with dreads.

Emma is a bathwater drinker so you can imagine our reticence to bathing her in the tea. So we have come up with an overly complex plan. We take rain water and boil it in a pot, then use a UV light on it and then filter it. Then we re-boil it to be warm enough for her to bath in. We use just two liters for each bath and put her in the pool donated by a friendly visiting Mom.

This lovely clean water is too good to resist so often I take a bath in it too. Initially I would try and sit in her pool with my legs hanging over the end and pretty much just my butt in the water. When that proved ineffectual except for having a clean bottom I decided to stand in the water and use an empty yoghurt tub to "shower". In this way I get relatively clean.

 

Miscellany

There have been some large grey Heron's hanging around the Center recently and we have been speculating as to what they could be doing here. It has not been that wet that there could be an over abundance of frogs. Well Emma and I saw the answer in technicolour and up close a few days ago.

The heron was stalking the large pile of stones that protects the cistern up from up our house and suddenly it speared into the long grass with its beak. It held a mouse dangling from by the tail and let it wriggle there for a while.

Emma and I watched in fascinated horror, and on my part a little queasiness as the heron swung the mouse around and got him head first inside his beak. At this point the mouse started squeaking in pain or fright and I wondered at the wisdom of letting Emma witness this. I was so transfixed though that I couldn't move. A few beak snaps later and the mouse was in the Heron's gizzard where we could watch it wiggling and turning trying to get out.

Then the final horror as the Heron swallowed and we watched the still wriggling mouse get pushed down the gullet swallow by swallow. Even now, remembering and writing this down I feel a little like throwing up. Poor mouse, lucky Heron.

Emma update

Emma is now at 106 words and adding new ones every day! Her favourite of the week is Pawpaw. She has a little board book of fruits and we think she just loves the word rather than the fruit. She is also using "another one" and loves to point out things where there is another one; another one car, another one shoe, another one pigeon.
We are most excited that she is starting to string words together. Her first "sentence" being; "Emma come Dadad" when she wanted to go to K's arms. She can also count to three and when there are many of a particular thing she says; " wa, doo, tee, hamammam" as she can't seem to remember four.