Skye Update

Skye has written several blog updates that her parents never posted.
She is asleep now, so I still can’t post them. Bugger.
She spends her days doing home schooling and enjoying life here and down at the lodge.
Her day starts at 06h00 when she gets up with the rest of us.
At 07h15 she walks Caleb and Mila to Xolisa’s hut, a bit further up the hill, where they walk to pre-school from.

She has about 1 and a half hours home schooling with Sonja (normally in the morning), and another hour and a half with me in the afternoons.

We are most conscious that the change in lifestyle is most drastic for her.
She moved away from all of her friends and activities and had just started enjoying movies and children’s sleepover parties, school team sports, and hanging out with all of her friends.
We compensate for this poorly, but are very aware we need to make more of an effort.
She is very bright, and makes home schooling pretty easy.
I am teaching her Natural Sciences a full grade (year) ahead of her peers, and her literacy is really good and we are well ahead of where she needs to be.
The biggest challenge is keeping her from getting bored with the work.
There is scope to introduce a lot of proejct work that she can do on her own.
There are not many village kids around of her age group so she spends a lot of time with us and other adults.
This becomes really challenging as a parent as you constantly need to be maintaining a balance between being free spirited and a young adult, and having her understand that some decisions are not hers to take.

She spends a lot of her free time pottering around the lodge or horse riding.
She has cut a deal with the village guides who offer horse riding as an activity that she helps clean the riding gear once each week in exchange for being able to ride one of the horses home after the rides.
Looking down from our hill I will see her riding bareback and completely alone, through the long yellow grass, taking the horse to the homestead a couple of kilometres away.
She loves it.
There are also a surprising number of children that visit the lodge with their parents, so quite often she makes friends for a few days with these families and goes canoeing, fishing or horse-riding with them.
We also make sure we fit in the usual family walks and fishing and swimming in the river.
She is slowly picking up Xhosa and seems much more confident greeting villagers and making simple conversation.
She loves all the farm animals and especially now as there are an abundance of baby lambs, kids and calves.
No baby chickens though!
Another favourite is driving the bakkie (pick-up).
I used to let her sit on my lap and steer, and told her when she could open and close the gates we have to drive through on her own, then I would teach her to drive (they are tricky gates, made of barbed wire and loose poles. No hinges here)
Well of course she did, quickly, and so a couple of weeks ago I put her in the driver’s seat.
After explaining which was the clutch, the brake and the accelerator (no automatic here), she calmly put us into first, did a perfect take off, and drove off beautifully. After a couple of minutes pottering along a 4-wheel drive track in first, I explained to her how to change into second, which she again did beautifully and drove us all the way to the lodge and parked.
She has done this a couple of times now, and I proudly reckon she id one of the only 9 year olds in her class to be able to drive a big, heavy bakkie.
Sonja and I have also taken her with us the few times we have had to go away to meetings.
When I drove to Cape Town she was so excited about having some one-on-one time, and loved little things like over-nighting at a B&B and using their little complimentary soaps, and finding a chocolate on her pillow.
Sonja will take her and Mila with her in a few weeks when she has to fly to JHB for business and Skye is so excited about flying again.
She is a great child and we need to make much more of an effort to make sure this remains a positive experience for her.
We’ll do our best, but definitely sometimes fall asleep knowing you could have done better, or been more patient.