I did go plant shopping (yep! You can do that) and found myself two nice plants. They were looking at me, begging me to rescue them. And since I’ve been known to bring home strays, my heart just melted when I saw them. I took them home and it was celebration all round. Gave them nice spot on the balcony, some water and I believe they will live happily ever after.

There is a group of people who purport to know me well, and when they saw what I up to, they were very quick to hand me their thoughts on my strays and survival probability.

This one even believes I need babysitting if the plant-life is to grow. Pfffff! I totally can keep the plants alive!

You know what this means, right? CHALLENGE! I will dress those plants every morning, keep them company at night while they fall asleep and sing them cute cuddly songs, if I have to, if only to prove to this lot that I am no plant killer!

In fact, I am going to fill the said pseudo-land (whispers a courage prayer) with plants to show the non-believers that I can do it!

Yes you can now wish me luck.

The year did not end so well for the me, Adams’ Mummy, his friends and the Wanadamu family as a whole, as we lost yet another little angel, Adams Kibet. I wrote about this wonderful boy and my experience and interaction with him, and if there is one thing I shall forever be grateful for, is having known this wonderful boy and his mummy, who have continued to inspire me and give me strength. This strong mummy of our fallen angel was there for me when we lost yet another little angel, Latoya, and I couldn’t make head or tail or meaning of such loss.

For fear of ruining the wonderful memory that this little boy represent to us, I shall say, Rest In Peace sweet angel. Watch over us as we carry on the fight that you gave meaning to.

Right. So we all know that I can never make New Year’s resolutions. Mainly because, as evidenced severally here and elsewhere, I can be quite scatter brained. I however like setting the year’s theme, preferably in the first week of the year. This I never do lightly. I do it after various consultations, including the Oracle. I kid you not. Last year, I was Introspecting Spectacularly. I have talked about the experience no end so I won’t go on about it. This year, We Go Guns Blazing. Having run through the year trying to understand who I am (kind of) I think I am now ready to take me for a test-drive. I am not sure what it will all be about but hey, that’s the beauty of life, isn’t it? So yes, I’ll keep you posted on the blazings that we (ok I) do and this being an election year, let’s try not to lose our heads as we make decisions that will affect us and the beautiful country we love and call home.

A smashing 2012 to all of you.

O wait! I forgot to mention. I had a really nice holiday. A break from routine which I totally needed.

I went here among other places.

And saw this, among other things.

I’m feeling quite refresh and ready to tackle the coming year.

One more thing. The other day I was asked to define the word Trust. See the problem is, we like throwing words around but never really pin down a meaning that we understand. No, forget the Oxford and those other huge books called dictionaries tell you. What meaning do you give to these, for lack of a better word, ‘heavy’ words? Words like Promise, Trust, Integrity… And a few others? So this what I came up with, after thinking extremely long and hard, paraphrased:

Trust: The ability to feel you can rely on someone, both when you are at your best and when you are at your worst. Knowing that the person will defend you, whether you are there or not, come rain or shine. Meaning that you do not have to hide your worst self or are not afraid to speak your mind whether you are right or wrong, for fear of being judged or misjudged. Also means that you can take risks in your personal and professional development, with the knowledge that the one person you trust will have your back whether you fail or succeed.

So anyway, I hate long goodbyes so….. see ya on the other side. Blessed 2012 you lot. Be good. Ok as good as you humanly can. Without hurting anyone or your brain cells.

Insider Information: When you bear offspring, you are always worried that you’ll never know when anything goes wrong, or right, for that matter. How will you know when his tummy is aching? Or his diaper is wet (not as obvious as you may think by the way)? Or when he swallows a roach? Or a coin? Or when his teeth start wobbling? Will you know in good time or will he swallow it in his sleep? I tell you, mummyhood can be a nightmare sometimes. Forget the cooing and all that. That’s the cute stuff. There is that other side that no one tells you! Thank God you have me. To tell you that is.

So anyway, we tend to get bored sometimes…, Junior and I. In the throes of boredom, we’ll clip our nails, I’ll rub his back or, we’ll count each other’s teeth. It’s fun! I can then use the line of ‘see how many teeth I have? You need to eat a lot of food to get as many teeth as mummy!’ Yep! The magic of a mouth full of pearly whites. Anyway, so this teeth counting day last week, we (I) discovered a wobbly one. I did go through all the appropriate reactions. Excitement! Panicking. Dry mouth. Sore throat. Singing a happy song. Hyperventilating… And you are wondering, where is he during all this? He’s not allowed to be in the bathroom with me. Which is where I was. After calming down, it was time to find out how to go about yanking the wobbly white.

Kid was pretty excited when I pointed it out. Mostly because he had been told by someone that once his teeth come out, he would automatically turn 6. I know! The information that gets passed down to children these days! He couldn’t stop playing with it. You know, shaking it and all to confirm and reconfirm that it was really wobbly.

In my infinite search, I came across a lot of ‘helpful’ information. Observe:

Seriously, you don’t think I got this advice? Fiiine. Don’t believe me. Check out this link of ‘wisdom’ then!

I was so busy looking for ways to get it out I didn’t at first notice him holding something in his hands, the bleeding mouth and his shocked expression. He doesn’t like the sight of blood, not even a hint of it so a mouth dripping with blood made him panicky, even weepy. But there it was. He had accidentally pulled it! Then there was me running around, looking for cotton wool and salt water to clean his mouth out and to check whether he got the whole damn thing out. He had done a good accidental job, believe it or not. I even baked him a cake.

Drama aside, I am very happy with how the first dropped tooth experience went. No dentist, him doing it by himself (albeit accidentally) and the celebration that went with. We even got to learn. Something. Least of all, the simplest solutions work best. Plus I am loving his minus one tooth smile!

Then why I’m I feeling grinchy this season, you ask? I don’t get people gifts on Christmas. First off, it’s cliché. I passionately dislike being caught up in clichés. Think. How many people are running in and out of gaudily decorated, last minute shops looking for that shirt, tie, scarf, bla? Yeah, go ahead and tell me. This is their idea of a perfect gift. Course it is! And I would not be one to look a gift horse in the teeth or mouth (seriously, this saying in my mother-tongue is hilarious. also, i take horses as gifts) so yeah. Get me that scarf or tie or toothbrush if you want. I do enjoy observing people. The general observation during this season is that people looking to buy gifts are running around like headless chicken, grabbing what they think the other person wants, or worse, asking the sales person what they think would be a perfect gift. If you are lucky, you will find a sales person who is not bored to tears with the question after answering 10 more people ahead of you, and they will be near helpful and tell you a tea set is the perfect gift for your mother. Hopefully, your brother has not ordered in a tea set from Dubai that makes yours look like it belongs in a doll house.

Also, there is a small problem of relatives. No. Really. Do you know the number of relatives I have claim to? And that number keeps growing. Take for example the get-together I attended the other day. I swear I had no idea who half the people were. Don’t you roll your eyes at me…! Not unless you have your family tree pinned up your fridge and you update it every time one of your relatives decides to bring forth another relative. And this time, I’m not even talking about relations by marriage. iCant. Now. You think it is not painful enough nodding around acknowledgements and pretending that you have understood when your mother tells you to meet the uncle to your cousin on your grandmother’s side, not the one who bore your mother, but the one your grandfather married just before he met your grandmother? Mind blowing, right? Now try and get this er….. (refer to the above relation) a perfect gift. No time to rummage through their garbage, or ask around or stalk their online profile. You look at the said relation and his new bride (*sigh*, relative plus one unknown) and think they look like a fun couple so you send them a pair of handcuffs. And word spreads around that you are in the profession that would make your great grandfather roll in his grave (Sidenote: Sneer all you want but I don’t think there’s a wrong profession) and you will have a few choice stares during the next ‘happy’ family reunion. How does negative news spread so fast through the clans anyway?

So you see, I love my relatives. Known, unknown, born, unborn…, all. But if I was to get each and everyone a christmas gift, I’d need to spend my entire life, plus a few extra lifetimes rummaging through bins, which, I know you may think it’s a perfect way to spend my life, but I get the odd feeling I can do a better job noting down birthdays and anniversaries and doing research for the perfect gift.

Ps: Please feel free to get me that Christmas gift. Pps: Mother will get a gift. Mostly because I get the feeling she has installed nanny cams in my house to watch over her grandson, and I’m not sure I have been the perfect mother, so let’s just say, pacification (not manipulation) will be at play this season. Ppps: I’m still trying to build that family tree to avoid those awkward family reunion moments. Pppps: Wait, can you use ps like this? Is it legal? Anywho, a reader called me out last night politely and indirectly demanding a post (don’t you just hate it when that happens especially when you’ve been tiptoeing around the world of writing hoping no one notices you haven’t blogged in weeks?). Which means I didn’t get much sleep, trying to come up with a decent post. Which means I’m grumpy. But I love my readers, so there. Grumpiness totally worth it.

I’m not an Australian aborigine (looks can be deceiving) and looking around, the shrubbery near me would not qualify as bush to be wandered in. Still, me being me, this has not stopped me from doing my own version of a Walkabout. In my head. Mostly. It may surprise you to know you probably have done your own version of a walkabout. In your head. Or the neighbourhood. You know, those times when you feel you just can’t take it anymore and you just want to be alone or need to take a walk to clear your head? That is my kind of walkabout. First, it doesn’t involve a lot of financial or mental (ok maybe a little mental) preparation. Or writing a will lest you get mauled by the jungle dwellers.

Mine started at the beginning of this year. I called it Introspecting Spectacularly. When I begun, I knew I needed to critically and inwardly take look at my life, define what life is, what I imagined I wanted to do and what was practical in my view. Consciously deciding you want to know what you are all about brings out a lot of ‘demons’ and ‘angels’ and I have faced a good number of mine. I have also gotten to do things and learn lessons that I believe were moulded by my making the conscious choice to review my life’s path and purpose. I still have a month to go on the Walkabout, but having settled so much into it, I don’t think I want to let go of the mini Walkabouts or the lessons to be learnt therein.

The mini lessons, my style, seem to have fallen into 3 major categories:

Trust

This concept was properly introduced to me near the beginning of the year. Not just the word trust but the overall deep concept behind the word. We are so used to language that we do not take time to really feel and decipher what certain words actually mean, and their impact in our daily lives. Trust does just encompass one person to the other. It also involves trusting yourself, and trusting the universe. It takes time, believe it or not. Just like the way trusting people takes time and, to use an all time cliché, has to be earned, trusting yourself and the universe takes time as well. Picture this. You are on your way to work. You’ve made good time. At the bus stop, a very funky bus stops right in front of you but your first, the slightest, most fleeting of instinct tells you not to get onto the bus. What is your first conscious thought? That you are being paranoid or unreasonable and this is a very good bus, that you have boarded severally and it has always gotten you to the next stop on time. Without fail. Now, suppose you get into the said bus, and 10 minutes into the ride your favorite bus gets a puncture. What do you tell yourself? I should have listened to myself! Just one example of how we ignore ourselves and have to learn to trust ourselves. Trust the universe as well. You’ll be surprised at how things will start falling in place once you learn how to.

Learn

Learning never stops till we are dead. Cliché? You best believe it! But how many people actually don’t notice or ignore the cliché all together? You walk around with the air of ‘I totally know it all!’ You don’t stop to think about that small child, that blackout experience from Kenya Power and Lighting Company, the irritation by the annoying government spokesman the woman begging on the street or even the weed (not the smoking one) that just one day sprouted outside your yard and is making your beautiful lawn look unsightly! Lessons. Everywhere. In everything. I have looked and come to realise that I know nearly nothing. Forget the academic experience you have acquired. What, you have 2 PHd’s? Good on ya mate. Do you know how low the temperature falls in the night? Ever thought of asking the homeless lad you pass by every morning on your way to work? ‘O but I have no need to know how low the temperature at night falls’ you say. And I will try very hard not to call you ignorant, and hope that in your escapades, your car never breaks down in a most inopportune time, say, like at night and you have to babysit it till morning when ‘they’ are able to send help. Simplistic? Of course! Lesson? You betcha. Come on, think of lessons you can learn from what appears to be the useless of sources at first glance.

Believe

Me? Preaching? Not on your life. Also, the last time I went to church is neither here nor there. Mostly theeeere. But believing in something (yeah, sure, believe in your awesome pair of shoes if it makes you happy) gives you some sort of balance. Grounding if you like. Believe in God. Your kind or form of God. A higher power. The reason I advocate for this is development of faith. You get into a project. You can see it’s immediate future and think that you have all bases covered. No. You don’t. Most of what you are doing is moving by faith, whether it is apparent to you or not. Now imagine consciously knowing that most of the things we get into are faith driven. Faith in ourselves, in a higher power, in the universe, in our friends…. The best way to increase this faith is increase your belief. The best way to increase the belief is to believe in a higher power than yourself.

O look. Time for my next mini Walkabout. Catch you when we can.

See, there are people who, since childhood, will gravitate towards creating things. Others like to take pictures (photography). Others are consumed by wanderlust and they can’t seem to settle in for more than a given period of time before taking off on a new adventure. Others like clothes, and so on. Unfortunately, as we grow older, these natural tendencies are stripped off either by parents or society telling us that money is not made from talent, or chasing other people’s goals in false belief that they are our own or even not knowing that if only we focused on what came to us naturally as children, then we would be able to do what we love, and even make money from it!

You don’t believe me? Let’s take an example. Case study if you will. A little girl has always loved dressing dolls up. She doesn’t know why she does it, but she keeps hounding her mummy to help her make tiny clothes to dress the dolls up. She can’t seem to get away from it, even when she is a teenager. Only this time, she begins dressing herself up. We know that not every child will be inclined to do such things. She is a brilliant performer in school and everyone keeps telling her that she will make a great doctor. She works extremely hard, and attains great grades to get herself into medical school. She still dresses well and seems to create a dress style that is uniquely hers. In your opinion, what really defines her? What would she find the most joy doing? Being a doctor or being a fashion designer?

Case study 2. A boy who cannot stop visiting places. The boy cannot sit in the house for extended periods of time since he was little. He knows his surroundings so well he can tell you who lives where, what river crosses which and the shortest route from his house to the shop. The boy is also quite good in school. His father tells him he will make a great lawyer some day. In between studies though, he always finds himself involved in outdoor activities, including organizing camping activities, traveling to different areas, and all his friends know that if they need an event out of town, he would be the best person to contact. He grows up consumed by wanderlust. Also, thanks to his father’s encouragement, he finds himself with good grades to enroll into law school. What should he do? Go to law school or become a travel agent?

In both cases, the choice being made is whether to follow the head or the heart. What would happen if we sat back and really considered who we are and what we seem to naturally gravitate towards, as opposed to what seem agreeable by society’s standards? Would we have happier, more productive people in our midst? Would mid-life crisis be as prevalent as it currently is? Food for thought.

Adams and his Mummy

The smile I never get used to. The boy that continues to touch my heart. The boy that I met thanks to Wanadamu. The initiative that has helped save lives and deliver such smiles to our hearts.

I told you about Wanadamu a few months back. I already knew it was a noble cause then. What I didn’t know was how it would affect my life or the lives of people around me. I have laughed. I have cried. I’ve had episodes of phone-to-wall smashing. Best of all, I have met extra-ordinary people living very low-key lives. People who help without asking why. People who are grateful even for a simple ‘good morning, how are you doing’. Strong people who even in the face of adversity are stronger than 2 of me on a very sunny day. Who always have a kind word and a smile for you even when you have nothing to offer them.

This is why I will continue supporting Wanadamu. This is why we should all support in whatever capacity we can. In it’s simplicity, Wanadamu is an initiative that maintains a database of registered donors, who get called upon in case of emergencies to donate blood, with the convenience of registering online or sending an e-mail to wanadamu@kunavijana.org with your name, cell phone number, location and Blood Group or sending an sms with your name, cell phone number, location and Blood Group to +254737712509.

What would we be without each other to pick us up when we are down or lend a helping hand?

Just so you know, he turned five recently. Lately, he has developed a heightened sense of adventure. The good/bad thing about the new sense is that it has no respect for gender boundaries. This means that if anything looks cool and dangerous enough, he’s going to try it, girly or not. If he is not climbing to the top of any cabinet to explore it’s hinges, he’s trying on his superman suit (which really is a sheet tied around his neck) and jumping off from relatively high places. At least he’s tall so I never have worry about him crawling under the bed to munch on poor roaches. Those were his toddling days. Take for example the eyebrow incident.

I am a do it yourself kind of person. This means that I prefer to wash my own hair, make my own nails, clip my own toe nails and yes, shave my own eyebrows. Shocking as it may sound, I’ve been known to doll myself up every now and then. Sometimes my boy is present during some of these activities. At such times, I like hearing his stories which although half the time they get so mixed up I am lost as to what we were talking about, they are always entertaining. He has been there during the eyebrow shaving moments. Several of them in fact. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would climb to the highest cabinet where I store such dangerous shaving equipment, grab one and actually attempt to shave his eyebrows. He did. I was shocked. I did not even think of appropriate punishment. Neither did I know whether to shape the eyebrows for him or just let them grow out, all patchy.

Had I not noticed the silence coming from the room where he was, I would not have been there in time to gasp and yell and try and explain to him why only mummy should have shaved eyebrows. He probably would have, God forbid, gone ahead and shaved off part of his hair and I can assure you, child welfare services would have been at my doorstep the following day. I have had to explain the eyebrows to a few people including his teachers, and conveniently prevented his grandmother from visiting my house but I can tell you, I am done getting surprised at stunts he is bound to pull. I am however more watchful because as amusing as some of these stunts are, I do realise that it could get quite dicey should he get himself into more dangerous ones. O yes. And I have dialed up explaining boy and girl things a notch. Also ‘dangerous and safe things’ lessons are in full force. All this without curtailing his sense of adventure or curiosity. Hopefully.

Then for one panicky moment, I started imagining what mother would say if she was on twitter and saw my timeline. Better yet, whether she would subliminally tweet (or what we fondly call sub-tweet/submarine-tweet/subaru-tweet) me or send me replies on some of those tweets. I can tell you for sure, for some of them, she would reach out from across the internet cables and wring my neck. Others she’d probably claim I was adopted and she never had time to go through my original family tree to determine the ‘saneness’ of the line.

She’s not one to cringe easily so instead she would probably find the fastest train to my house and cover my ‘nakedness’ so to speak. That would be after giving me several lines of well intended, church appropriate lecture.

But that’s about my timeline. What about HER timeline? Would I even follow her? Assuming that I had a decent timeline so I wasn’t afraid of her following me back? And what would she tweet about? Let’s see… probably about her work. That’s for sure. About that nosey neighbour who is always dropping in for a quick chat when she’s in the middle of preparing for a Women’s Guild meeting that she happens to chair. How kids of these days, including her daughter, have no sense of organisation perhaps? Or about her grandson who cannot speak a word of her mother-tongue, or in this case her grandmother-tongue considering her daughter is a pile of hopeless when it comes to imparting language?

The more I think about it, the more I realise she probably would die of shock on day one of joining twitter, then die again upon coming across my timeline, then spend the rest of her days in seclusion, deep in fast and pray, hoping that Jesus would swoop down and erase the internet as a whole. So today I made a point of thanking the Lord that mother is not on twitter.

O and Just so you know, the day my kid joins twitter is the day I quit social media in totality.