For someone who supposely doesn’t watch TV, Dorje’s pretty good at telling me all about what Power Rangers and Transformers can do, and how police kill baddies with guns, or chop them up with swords. And of course he must demonstrate.

So, on Sunday I was once again a baddie being hacked with a sword (a small branch), when he hit me on the knuckle. It was sore.

“Do you love me but not like me?” he asked. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but I think it comes from something his mom has probably been trying to tell him – that you can love someone, but not like what they’re doing.

So yes, I love Dorje, but don’t like being beaten up by him.

Later that day we were talking about who’s who in the family. He was telling me about his ouma (Anique’s mom), and that his mom’s ouma was old, and died. “But boys don’t die,” he said, “only girls”.

Sadly I had to tell him that’s not the case, and that when they get old, men die too.

My father is turning 80 this weekend, and Dorje is of course coming to the party.

“I’m going to go to grandpa’s party, and then he’s going to die,” he announced. I looked at him, and he had his best sweet cherubic face on, with just a hint that he was looking for a reaction. He didn’t get much from me, but I’m sure if he said that to others, like say, my mother, he’d get a much more rewarding reaction!

Saturday morning saw Dorje overloading on fruit. For breakfast, he had pawpaw, grenadilla, nectarine and pineapple, and then moved on to the main course of muesli with yogurt and golden linseeds, linseeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds….. and molasses.

He has sweet molasses at his mom’s house, so is quite used to the taste. However, I don’t have sweet molasses, I have blackstrap molasses, which is extremely bitter.

Two or three years ago I played a trick on him where I swapped sweet molasses with blackstrap molasses. His expression said it all, and I think I put him off any molasses for a few months.

So this time I asked him if he was sure. He said yes. I suggested he taste it first before smothering it all over his muesli,and gave him a tiny bit on a spoon. I asked him if he liked it, but as is his habit, he said yes as the spoon entered his mouth, before actually tasting any.

But even after he’d tasted it he said he liked it! Blackstrap molasses, something even I, drinker of wormwood tea and known as the ‘anti Jamie Oliver’ when I cook for myself, think tastes pretty vile!

I gave him a bigger spoon. He still liked it. I poured a small amount over his muesli. He liked it.

I’m still suspicious, or rather worried that his taste buds have been destroyed somehow. He even asked for ‘yuckie tea’, or wormwood tea the other day. We have a game where we drink a sip, and either make sounds of agony, gasping and gagging in horror, or sounds of ecstasy, as if we were drinking a wondrous ambrosia, nectar of the gods. He drinks a fair bit of wormwood tea before the game wears thin.

the “Rasta girls” are his new best friends (:lol:)

So he says to me last night “Mum, all girls are Rasta girls” (:confused:)
So I ask him “Am I a Rasta girl?”
He exclaimed, rolling his eyes at me (:rolleyes:) Apparently boys can’t be Rasta’s either. (:lol:)

I just love how he calls them “the Rasta girls”. Conversations go like “I played in the sandpit with the Rasta girls”. Or, “the Rasta girls and I had a tea party”

OK, in fairness they call themselves “the Rasta girls”. Trinity, one of “the Rasta girls”, tells me yesterday “Us Rasta girls are KOOL girls”.

I tell you, this age kraks me up (:lol:)

Dorje has obviously been listening carefully to me when I curse the puppy when he has been flippen norty. Granny G tells me she asked him the other day “Hows your puppy?”

He says “Not so well my mummy says Londy must find a new home” (:lol:)

I took Dorje up the mountain today. I try to go most weekends that I have him. It was, thankfully, after all the fires, a slightly drizzly day, and perfect for walking.

We left bright and early at 12am. I did quite well making breakfast, and dragging him away from smothering more pink fingerpaint on the paper. He insisted on taking some cars with though, but after intensive negotiations we could leave the large green one behind.

And you wonder why I never got to take him to school. It was quite an early morning (8am, compared to 9h15 the previous day), though both evenings were quite late (about 21h15) – the first when I was subjected me to Flushed Away, and the second after a visit to his 2nd cousins

We went up the path towards Elsies Peak, starting from Black Hill, and turned off on the path just before the ‘eye’. Our only close encounters were with a few ants (Dorje still remembers too well being bitten by an ant walking in Hermanus, so the ants didn’t join us for long), and a few ‘slugs’ in the water pools on top of the rocks.

He can climb quite well now – I’m sure if anyone saw us on the rocks there’d be another Michael Jackson incident. I finally understand my mother’s concern whenever I used to go caving or climbing – myself plummeting to my death never particularly concerned me, but there were times today when Dorje, centimetres from the edge above a 10 metre drop, got my heart racing.

He understands his boundaries well (thanks perhaps to our earlier responsible parenting of bringing him up in a mountain house with a balcony and no railing), and asks or help if he needs it.

Unfortunately he doesn’t understand my boundaries that well, and thinking I’m immortal, combined with his current craze for fighting (beating me with a sword, hitting or pushing me) doesn’t work so well when I’m perched on the edge.

Anyway, we both live to tell the tale, and the most frightening moment for Dorje came when the thunder got too close, and we decided to head back before the rain set in. I must take him upcountry sometime – if he finds Cape Town thunder frightening what hope a real Joburg thunderstorm.