Flight to Botswana

I flew to Botswana again this morning. As we flew over Midstream I took a few aerial photos, one of which is shown below.

Gaborone has had low water levels for quite some time. We flew over the Gaborone Dam, which is the city's main water reservoir, shortly before landing. There's water, but not much. Certainly not enough for very long, so hopefully there'll be some more rain soon.

Bulletjies

Pieter is very keen to participate in Bulletjie Rugby this year. Yesterday was an initial impromptu training session. The real kick off, so to speak, of the season will be tomorrow afternoon.

It looks as though Pieter and Neil will be great friends. Pieter is a very loving big brother and is able to sooth Neil to sleep by playing him CDs in his room and by pushing him around in the pram. Neil might turn out to be a bulletjie one day himself (assuming we'll still be living in the same province then).

Granddad's birthday

Miekie and Pieter made this using some stickers (click the image to see a larger version)

Having gone to bed later than usual last night, Miekie didn't wake up as early as she normally does. I made her coffee anyway, at the usual time, but it cooled off for longer than it does on most other mornings. Miekie didn't say anything about it but Marisa found this little hastily written note a little later:

Growth update

Neil was weighed again on Thursday. He now weighs around 4.8 kg. His growth curve (from discharge date onwards) is currently slightly super-exponential, as can be seen by the decreasing time constant (which I arrived at through refitting an exponential curve to the data with each new measurement). I've plotted the time constant in the second graph below. (The first time constant estimate is only based on two data points and could probably be disregarded, particularly in light of the large gap between it and the other two estimates.)

The pale blue line is the exponential trend-line which I've calculated from his discharge weight onwards (and mirrored back to his birth date, which highlights that the initial weight loss was far more rapid than subsequent weight gain)

The time constant looks as though it may settle at about 70 days

I'll abandon the exponential model once the time constant starts increasing significantly again (i.e. when Neil's growth factor starts slowing).

Miekie's birthday party

Miekie's birthday party was finally held at our house yesterday afternoon. Marisa took most of these photos as I had to be in Botswana. Luckily Marisa's parents were there to help with everything because it's quite a feat hosting a multitude of young girls.

During construction of a piñata, the day before the party

A relaxed little bather

It's been three and a half weeks since the first bathing video, so I took another one yesterday. Neil is still a very relaxed bather, although still not completely at ease, as one can see from his clenched fists.

My Botswana trips are becoming more regular again so I'm off early tomorrow morning and will stay one night. This means that I'll unfortunately miss Miekie's party on Friday. (Her party was postponed due to Neil's birth just before her birthday, so it's now being held almost a month after she turned eight.)

A welcome to melck.org and some miscellaneous photos

My small melck domain name collection has just grown by one: I'm now the proud owner of melck.org, which seems to have been abandoned by its previous owner. I'm hopeful that the melck.com cyber-squatter will decide to stop hogging it at some stage, but it's been years of hoping. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with melck.org and melck.co.za but for the time being they pass on emails sent to them to their corresponding melck.net addresses.

Here are a few photos taken today:

Pieter made a replica of Maja during his art class

Pieter and I fetched Miekie after school, as we do on many days

Marisa took a few photos of Neil and me last week:

Even though these were taken last week, Neil has grown so much since then that he looks tiny on these!

Blue or brown?

Marisa has brown eyes. I have blue eyes. Miekie and Pieter both have blue eyes. As eye colour is determined by genes and brown eye genes are dominant over blue eye genes, it follows that Miekie and Pieter inherited blue eyes from both Marisa and me. This means that Marisa is a carrier of the blue eye gene but that its expression (the phenotype) is overridden by the brown eye gene which she is also a carrier of.

Genetic crossover, the process by which a single set of 23 chromosomes is created from the double set in a parent for passing on to a child, is random and not influenced by the parent's phenotype. So Miekie and Pieter both received Marisa's blue eye gene by chance. As I have blue eyes it means I have two copies of the blue eye gene and thus our children have all received one of those from me. This means that the probability of one of our children having blue eyes is 1/2 because 2/2 (me) x 1/2 (Marisa) = 1/2 (child).

So statistically in only 1 of every 8 (which is 1/2 cubed) families with three children, where the parents have the same eye colour gene combinations as Marisa and I do, will all three children have blue eyes (or will all three have brown eyes). The probability for Neil having blue eyes is, of course, still 1/2 because his genes are not influenced by the genes of the other children. Although it's still too early to say for sure, we're starting to think that his eyes are getting a bit darker. Time will tell if he'll break the trend...


Anyway, here are a few photos that I took over the weekend.

The ascent

At the summit

Marisa wearing her Valentine's Day present around her neck

Milkshakes and coffee for 80% of the family; the remaining 20% received some milk upon arrival back home

Valentine's Day

I spent the past two days in Botswana and flew back last night.

The view from my window, just before departing from Gaborone

Being Valentine's Day we spoilt each other a bit this morning. Neil got a thing that looks like a bag with eyes but which can be sneakily inverted to become an elephant.

Spot the difference

Pieter got a 2x2x2 Rubik's Cube.

It's still pretty tricky to solve!

Miekie got stickers and a book in which to stick them.

Unicorns and dragons and suchlike

Marisa got a necklace with a cubic zirconium, and I got a special cube, called the Gear Cube Ultimate 3x3x3, which is proving a little tricky to solve.

I'll get there in the end (I hope!)

A smile and quite a lot of growth

Neil smiled today for the first time!

Feeling happy after a nice long nap!

Neil has made good progress growth-wise. Marisa had him weighed today and he now clocks in at 4.2 kg, which is some 600 g (17%) more than his birth-weight of 3.58 kg. As all babies lose weight after birth as they burn through their glycogen stores and dispose of water weight, Neil's discharge weight was about 3.3 kg (-8% from birth). So compared to that, he's managed to gain about 900 g (27%) in almost three weeks. Not bad!

All that milk has to go somewhere!

More visitors and a cancelled swim

Misha and her mother came for coffee and cake this morning. Neil was very well behaved!

Swimming was cancelled this afternoon, just moments after the children got into the pool, due to too much lightning activity.

The three of us like being silly sometimes

So we got back home in time to see Neil being dressed after his bath and before his bedtime.

Another one of Neil before he woke up this morning. His left hand is somewhere in there...

A sweltering Sunday

We went to visit Marisa's parents for lunch today. It is the furthest away from home that we've been thus far with Neil (which isn't saying much). It's also the lowest altitude that he's been in his life, at 1350 meters above sea level (we live at an altitude of 1510 meters, so that isn't saying much either). It was also probably one of the warmest days it's been recently with temperatures reaching the mid 30's, at least.

Pieter, who has been a little envious of Miekie's binoculars that she got for her birthday last month, has been lent an enormous pair by Marisa's parents. This is until he gets a pair of his own (which will probably have to be soon).

The past few days

Life has been quite calm and uneventful over the last few days. Here is a collection of a few photos taken recently.

On one of our regular late-afternoon walks

Marisa noticed that Neil quite likes having his feet massaged:

Pavlovian Maja

Our clever Maja has a very strong Pavlovian response to the sound of a brown paper bag and can distinguish the sound such a particular bag from other bags.



Well, it's really not much of a surprise because that sort of bag normally contains biltong. And sometimes she's lucky enough to get a piece.

(Actually, she's not the only one in our family with this Pavlovian response...)

Regular swimming and irregular electricity

Miekie and Pieter have swimming lessons at Orcas Swim School at Southdowns College on Mondays and Wednesdays. They've made fantastic progress since starting there. Here's a short video of their swimming classes. Miekie is in the group in the far side of the pool and Pieter is in the near side group. Both are wearing blue swimming caps.

As I'm trying to spend as much time as I can working from home, Eskom's load shedding can be a disruption. So rather than going to sit and work (and drink coffee) at our local Mugg and Bean (which has generator-provided power) every time the power goes off, I retrieved my spare 100 Ah Land Rover battery from the garage and bought a 300 W inverter. My battery charger took about three days to charge the battery but now it is sufficient to power my laptop charger, our modem and router, my second display and something else, for example a fan, for at hours on end. So at I can continue working during load shedding!

The guts of the setup next to my desk: the battery in the black box, the battery charger in front of it and the inverter to the left

Close-up of the inverter with an adapter to which I connect a multi-plug and then all my power-hungry devices

Slightly tidier with the battery box lid on

I'm happy to say that it works very well!

Pieter's haircut

It was high time for Pieter to get a haircut. Marisa made an appointment for him at our local salon, where he is already well known and liked, as I discovered when I took him there this afternoon.

Very smart and ready to take ownership of the standard post-haircut fizzer sweet, which the salon uses as an incentive to encourage good behaviour in its younger customers (not that it was at all necessary for Pieter)