Today heralded yet another milestone in our lives, the day Nathan started school.

We’ve enrolled him 3-days a week, from 9-12 at a local playschool. It’s quite something as any parent who’s experienced it will tell you.

Aside from the obvious there are things like buying a backpack, stationery, packing fresh fruit and labeling a gazillion bits of paraphernalia down to shoes and socks (not that he’s a fan of either).

As I’ve shared in the past being a Stay-At-Home-Dad is a bit of an anomaly in these parts, which in turn meant we didn’t really socialise with other kids during the first 2 years of his life, we largely had each other for company and more recently our childminder.

I was a little worried about how he might react around so many kids, though in all fairness he’s been attending our weekly Sunday school for the better part of a year, along with visits to the local park.

The day started with much fan fare, picking out his favourite clothes, packing his new backpack with apples, a water bottle and change of clothes. Brimming ear to ear we fired off a couple snapshots (begrudgingly I might add) and then made the journey to his new school.

On arrival we were met with many a tear from fellow classmates, after running the gauntlet we took him to meet his teacher, whose name he’d been practicing with us. After greeting her he found his coat hook and slung his bag over it before taking a seat by himself at the activity table, all of his own accord.

And that was that, no tears or heartache, just a friendly smile and wave with our impending departure.

Kathy and I returned to collect him at 12pm and found him happily playing on the jungle gym, greeting us with a hug and proudly showing off the star on his forehead.

His teacher was gushing at how confident and courteous he was, causing a sense of pride to well in my chest and thoughts of “That’s my boy!” running through my head.

She was surprised to see that he’s already potty trained and that he didn’t skip a beat asking for assistance when he needed to go. I felt like telling her that the reason was that in a day and age where most affluent folk use disposable nappies we used cotton, washable ones, a great motivator to get him onto the toilet as soon as he was up to it… I can’t imagine having to deal with TWO kids in nappies.

After saying our goodbyes we managed to leave relatively unscathed, though his favourite hat was lost in “The Battle of Fallen Toys”. There is hope though, because Mommy labelled it.

Merry Christmas all!

I recently shared over on Curbly what it’s like having a Summer Christmas (which may be a foreign concept to many readers) and shared that I had something special planned this year.

In my continued efforts to be a little more self-sufficient I took on the fairly monumental task of growing ALL the vegetables and herbs we served today.

Understand it took 4 months to grow the carrots and 9 months to grow the onions, but I couldn’t think of a better way to share the harvest than with my family around the table, celebrating Jesus’s Birthday.

We bought 2 plump free range hens from our local, GoGo’s Deli, via my farming friends at Simply Wholesome and some bacon and pork mince for the stuffing from my friend Martin at Cure, the rest, I grew.

I took Nathan along yesterday and he helped me cut the mixed beans and pulled carrots while I dug out the potatoes and gathered up the various herbs.

None of this would have been possible without the help and support of my gardening partner, Alison Currie, who, over a year ago allowed me to rip up her backyard and commence growing food on it. For that I’m truly indebted to her and have enjoyed out weekly pickings, conversations and growing friendship.

I’ve posted several of the recipes over in my Curbly round-up here and ours included lemon infused wax beans with toasted almonds, beets with fresh thyme, honey glazed carrots & leeks, rosemary roast potatoes, chili, coriander & bacon butternut, braised cabbage, onion & caraway seeds.

In the spirit of an African Christmas we shunned the traditional red and green and went with a black and metallic theme. I took inspiration from our indigenous garden and filled bowls with succulents, dried aloe leaves and candles in copper and gold.

I roped Kathy into sewing the napkins and table runner and it felt great to work on a creative project together, she normally lets me run with it and enjoys the spoils.

It truly was a homegrown Christmas! How was your Christmas? What did you get up to?

Narrated by the late Alan Watts the above video addresses issues I’ve had with societies perpetual indoctrination of young minds with the ideology that the end goal in life is a career were you make money, lots of it, as if it brings some kind of resolve or resolution.

I opted out of this cycle years ago, in fact I never really bought into it. Growing up there wasn’t a lot of money around with a single mother raising 3 boys. We lived in hand me downs, made our own toys and buried ourselves in books.

That said it’s not like I didn’t have parents who weren’t worried about where I’d end up in life and they encouraged me to take up tertiary studies to have something to fall back on. Since I was living under my mothers roof I could but only oblige and so I studied fine art and graphic design (yes, I understand for many these may not be the best choice of fall back options!).

My passion was always music and I plowed everything I had into it and while I worked in the field of new media circa 1997-2002 it was a means to an end to make my passion a career. By 2003 I was on my way to having released my 2nd album and later 3rd, both nominated for South African Music Awards and which took me to over 80 cities worldwide to perform my music working with many of my luminary musical influences and heroes.

The downside in all this is that I left my then girlfriend, now wife and mother to our two children for up to 7 months of the year while I was on the road. In 2005-2007 I went back to working in design while she finished up her accounting internship and I started learning to build and repair electronic equipment on the side knowing that my end goal was to open a recording studio to keep me involved with my passion of music, but closer to home.

For 3 years I ran one of Cape Town’s best equipped studios, recorded over 100 records, mostly young independent bands and a few well known international acts, but I was working 12-16 hour days, 7 days a week and in 2010 I spent 7 weeks of 7 days juggling 3 projects, the last of which my swansong, Annie Lennox’s ‘A Christmas Cornucopia’.

I got back to South Africa two weeks ahead of Nathan’s due date, my career could have cost me one of life’s most precious moments and it was a sacrifice I wasn’t willing to make and so I decided to take a year off to become a stay-at-home Dad. I leased the studio, took a small retainer we started to enjoy life a lot more.

Why me? Well Kathy’s moved up to become a senior manager in one of the Worlds largest accounting firms, earns more that I did, has family medical, dental and other fringe benefits and works fewer hours… It wasn’t a hard decision.

A year past and I decided not to return to the studio life and sold my assets, in that time I’d become the primary caregiver, family cook, urban farmer and added a string of other titles to husband and father.

Two years in now I’ve become a homemaker, decorating our house with thrifted finds, landscaping and building a place for us to call home.

Sure going from a dual income to single income has meant cutting back in many areas, but the quality of life we have is far superior to the life we had. My career changes had nothing to do with failures, rather a shift in focus to do what was best for our family and lives, rather than making money our goal.

It’s bought with it emotional challenges, I’m still constantly fighting the archetypal notion of the male breadwinner, being that I now make the bread rather than buying it.

Kathy’s going to return to work next month and I’ll be staying home with the two kids and have put measures in place to help ease things. We have a fantastic childminder, Happy, who will help me 4 mornings a week. Nathan will be a play school for 3 of those, giving me 4 hours on those days to pick up some freelance work, probably in electronic design work and hopefully leave time for my weekly blogging commitments and my day to day household chores.

All this to say, follow your heart. If you’re unhappy in your current work or life situation, change things, don’t live out of fear and let it paralyze you. I’m proof that change doesn’t kill you, it will move you, it will shake you, but you may just come out of the other side feeling happier and more at peace with those decisions.