June 2011

  

Gill in the UK Gill went to England, me and kids walked up main road and down tam tams pub holding arches with balloons on following some drummers for ‘children’s day’.  On way home cut through novo, a women had dropped some balloons, I got them for her and we got invited to a childrens day party in the afternoon.  Greta fun, kids made multi coloured salt bottles, had pizza, sweets and coke etc.  Then they had games in the pool.  Then the restaurant bought out a big chocolate cake for one of the kids birthdays.  No famous faces, but a cheeky freebie nonetheless.

Thanks Tony, for finally contributing to the blog.

My version of the UK. I flew to Brussels, slept in the airport that night- locked in the ladies loo cubicle –nice!   It was like being a student again. Then I visited Brussels for the day, flew to Heathrow, coached to Gatwick, collected our car and drove to my mum-in-law‘s house in Romford. A breeze.

In the UK, I did shopping, shopping, shopping, funded by selling the car, with the help of my Mum and Dad. Bye bye X reg Picasso, sad to see you go. Tony now wants a quad bike instead of a car out here, so the joys of mid-life crisis are now affecting both of us.

I had great fun in England – eating Indian takeaways, going to Jonah’s birthday party, eating Chinese takeaways, shopping at Asda, shopping at Tesco, shopping at TK Maxx, and finally the mecca of shopping- Lakeside, Essex. I had tons of enjoyment with the credit card at Lakeside, until I discovered it was a two hour bus journey to get home to Chelmsford, Essex, (via a change of bus at Basildon bus station). Luckily, my perfect hostess, Georgina, was on hand to save the day and rescue me.

My jolly to the UK was the first time I have left the kids, and excepting the odd hour or two, I didn’t miss them. I didn’t have time.

I arrived back to Sal on Holly’s 9th Birthday and was met at the airport by Daniel, performing Capoeira like a demented cockroach at the Arrivals lounge and Tony thankfully not following suit.

We made a spontaneous decision to collect the elder two kids from their school, which is next door to the airport, and taxied back to the apartment. (I’m not quite sure what gallons of airplane diesel dropping on them from overhead on a daily basis is doing to their health, but they’re happy spotting planes at playtime). One hour of unloading two suitcases full of Haribos later, Holly dived into unwrapping her presents. Again, there is not much to buy here on the island from the cheap Chinese warehouses, except a plastic jeep or dolly’s make-up set. However, Holly seemed over the moon with her Enid Blyton Malory Towers bookset and Horrible Histories book collection. Or was it the onset of the Haribos sugar rush kicking in?

We had a perfect family day in, and a welcome relax. Her birthday party was a day trip to Waikiki Spa for a hand and foot nail paint with her school friend, Daniella. Life seemed more than idyllic, until the nail technician told me about a 50 kilo hash drugs bust the night before.  Apparently it had something to do with Cape Verdean fishing waters, Chinese fishing boats, Brazilian fishermen and the man from the Italian ice cream shop down the road. I hear the islands are a good source of trafficking certain items, but luckily they seem to pass in and out of the waters, without being offloaded onto the islands. So I’m OK with that.

Back to Holly’s party, we had nails done, then ice creams at the ice cream parlour (the owner wasn’t there), back to ours for pancakes and eggy bread. What a party! I bought one of those huge silicone muffin tins in England, expecting a glamour swirly, whirly buttercreamed masterpiece of a cake to pop out of my Halogen oven. In short, it looked like a big lump of manure. Inspiration saved the day, with a scattering of edible silver balls and some 100’s and 1000’s sprinkles. I have always taken photos of the home-made birthday cakes I have made for my children. On my deluded wavelength, I see it as a token of my love for them. Aged 1 years old, I started with woodland-inspired creatures surrounded by an array of rainbow-coloured icing sugar sculptures. Now, it’s any kind of traybake, smeared with a mountain of sparkly icing or sprinkles. Do I love my children less? It seems so!

Birthday season is over in our house, and the balloons finally come down. We went back to daily life. Joey has been having lessons from Tony in how to be a strapping Cape Verdean brute of a person. (Yes, I know this is a bit hard to picture). Joe is a lovely, happy boy who is always surrounded by a throng of friends, and never happier than doing something 1970’s-inspired like hopscotch or spinning a hoop Enid Blyton-like…  Well, no, that’s my motherly rose-tinted spectacles, but he’s just not the hard-tackling rugby playing type, we all know that.

So, he’s been learning to not only punch back, but get in there first, if you feel a tussle is on the cards. This being Cape Verde, this is most of every play-time. Cape Verdean life and its people are just tougher. Kids can be out selling bananas from their early teens onwards, the Catholic families are large and you just take what you can from life. So, teachers don’t mediate playground power struggles. They just leave children to get on with the natural activities of finding out the pecking order of life.

Nowadays, Joe is still the happy-go-lucky court jester, but with a hint of Rocky Balboa wherever necessary. Holly gets stuck in there, too. Although she’s a pretty mature, grounded girl by European standards, she’s perceived here a little bit like Sharpay from High School Musical – over-confident and spoilt – a show-off. She’s having a small issue of jealous/immature catty schoolgirl pettiness you’d normally get in Secondary School, but she’s doing really well and riding it with her usual maturity and positive outlook. Daniel, is also intergrating better, in that he actually likes people beyond the family circle now.

He’s also discovered girls.

I don’t really know what happened to the rest of June. We had class friends over to play and the children settled back down again into regular school life. We attended  Daniel’s Parents Afternoon. The teacher says he prefers to talk in Creole (local Portuguese dialect) rather than Portuguese. That’s Danny taking the easy option as always. It did make me laugh as we took his drawings and other school work home with us. In nearly every picture he drew the five of us and two houses. Mummy and Daniel stay in the big one and the other three are relegated to the small one. They often have to draw a picture of something they like and also something they don’t like. Sport seems to be a frequent dislike, and Tony is quite often in there, too. Mummy’s boy never puts me in those negative pictures, so I will continue to bake cakes and let him lick the bowl out etc and Tony can carry on making him finish his plate off. It works for me!

On a final note, we were pretty upset as we had Take That tickets, which we sold as we really couldn’t justify not earning AND spending £1000’s on a flight to the UK. To those of you who did go to the concert, I hope you had a brilliant time, and we’re both very envious.

So, we decided to up our stakes on the entertainment out here. We got out the Monopoly board and the Cluedo and decided to enrol the kids on a higher plane of family fun.  Easing them in with Monopoly (yawn), Joey kicked our butt and made Holly cry. Just explaining my children, Holly is mega-competitive and fairly money-orientated, which will make her very successful in life combined with her intelligence, beauty, optimism and level-headedness… (just in case she reads this blog)… Joe smiles his way through life and karma ensures he wins any game involving a dice, 99% of the time. So he duly thrashed us.

Next stop, Cluedo. How a six year old can work out it was Mrs White in the Kitchen with a revolver before two adults and a 9 year old is beyond me. But he did! Last stop, Chinese Checkers, a game of strategy. Whooped our sorry backsides once again. Snakes and ladders, Frustration you guessed it. He’s never going to Uni, I’m just taking him to a Casino when he’s old enough.

This being my very final note, I have to commend Tony on his cookery skills, as he is now the best (packet) cake mix chef in the house. It takes six minutes of whisking by hand, so I think he’s got an unfair advantage. A tad annoyingly, he has christened himself “Captain Cakeman”, and spends many a time chortling to himself on that one.

We have moved on to trialling home-made yoghurt recently, so keep your eyes posted for the next exciting July instalment of our blog, and find out whether we successfully perfected it or not.

Lots of love to you all, Gill and the gang xxx