It's Sunday afternoon and I've got a precious few moments to myself while Leola is sleeping (she never naps long, so I'm typing fast!). Below is a brief update from Tim on our lives in the last few months, while there's a more extensive story on our UK trip and Leola's life on her blog.
I'm not going to add much from my side other than to tell you that life as a mother is absolutely wonderful. Leola is a super-content baby and changing so rapidly, there's something new every day... When we left for the UK a few weeks ago, she would just lie on her play gym and look around. When we came home, 12 days later, she'd meanwhile learnt how to grab things, kick her feet agains the musical footrest, smile at herself in the mirror and roll from her back to her side. So cute!!
She's also learnt how to grab my hair, and since the grab reflex is learnt long before the "release" reflex, I'm spending a fair amount of time carefully prying my hair out of those little fingers.
We're meanwhile learning that life with a baby means a never-ending list of expenses. Our latest two purchases are a jogger pram and a new camera. The jogger pram is essential, because her other buggy, a Quinny, is very compact and great in shopping centres but useless in the forest. With the jogger, Leola, Gandalf and I can go for daily walks in the forest! The camera was even more essential because, as any parent knows, you just want to capture every little smile and my current camera just wasn't doing a good enough job on the close ups.Enough from my side. We're all happy and healthy and feeling so blessed! Over to Tim...
Where do I start? The last couple of months have just flown by due to work, travel and a certain little angel who keeps her mother (and to a much lesser degree me) on permanent sentry duty!
I am back on the Eirik Raude offshore Ghana, performance coaching a crew of 140 guys in an environment where things can go horribly wrong if we are not careful, but one which is remarkably comfortable once you get used to it…
This picture was taken last night as we flowed the well with both booms blazing at a rate of 16 000 barrels of oil per day!
One of the off shift activities I facilitated over the last 3 months was a fitness challenge which proved pretty popular and certainly raised the fitness bar for a number of us. There were 11 disciplines including aerobic, cardio vascular, strength and speed challenges across the board with classic Royal Marine type stuff like pull ups and press ups as well as challenges for the big heavies such as squats and bench press. Finally, of course there were the vomit exercises such as rowing 2000m as fast as you can and running 10 minutes on the treadmill at level 20!!!
In this picture I am posing with the top 4 – all from Oceaneering (2 former ‘boot necks’ themselves!!).
In July, Ange and I barely stopped for a breather as we hosted friends in Cape Town before travelling the UK for work, a wedding and to see friends plus their newborn babies. We had a wonderful time despite (all) carrying a bit of a cold for the entire trip.
Ange has covered the journey in Leola’s blog but suffice to say it was so nice to stay with the Mills, see the Wighams, Martins and others at Brigid and Rob’s wedding and then stay with Tony/Alex, Nick/Sam and Craig/Tanya (as well as their respective offspring of course)…
When we got back from the UK, I had a 4 hour turnaround at home before returning to the airport to head up to Joburg, meet Marc Truman and drive up to Falcon for the 20 year Falcon Old Boys reunion. What an absolute blast we had – such humour and brilliant to see guys I literally haven’t seen since 1990 :)
We ate, drank, reminisced, wandered around boasting about how it was much tougher in our day, witnessed the new Quest Africa set up at Quiet Waters (particularly significant to Ange and me given the consulting support we have given that project), played the first gamers at touch rugby and just had a laugh at each other. I spent quality chat time with Marc and Jase and am reminded of how blessed I am to have friends like them. Truly high calibre, high value, noble and inspiring people.
Most satisfyingly, we pumped Peterhouse on the Saturday. What more could we have asked for??
Back on the rig, I keep in regular comms with my amazing wife who is doing an exceptional job with our daughter and as if that is not enough of a challenge, has decided to go back to work! Fortunately, it is on a manageable/flexible level at first and again we are blessed that we have that option.
Until next time – hope all is well with all of you :)
