Happy and Sad

Today's is Dejone's birthday and it is a happy and a sad day. I guess it is going to be like this for the rest of my life and unfortunately there is nothing DJ can do about it. Dejone and my father shares there birthdays and up to 2005 it was awesome but since my father died in 2006 it is with mixed emotions that we face 25 November. On the one side we can't spoil DJ day and we owe it to her and want to give her a birthday to remember but in the back of my mind I wonder how it would have been with my father still around before Alzheimer disease ripped him away from us.


Dejone gave us special instructions yesterday of how she wants the day to begin. Listening to her yesterday I could see her great grandmothers German blood coming through. She wanted to be woken up at 5h45 as this would give her 15 minutes to enjoy her birthday before her normal 6am rise and shine.


She also wanted her breakfast cereal and a cup of tea. She gave us all these precise instructions. I picked two flowers from the garden to decorate the tray with her breakfast on just to make it a little lady like. When we woke her up I could see that she was already awake but she acted if she was still sleeping. Tonight she admitted to me that when we approached her room she heard us and woke up but didn't want to spoil it for us.


The whole family greeted her, my mother, sister, sisters fiance, brother in law and me and Kim. I can see that she is changing from a little girl to a little lady just by looking at her gifts. Gone are the dolls and toys, she wanted lady stuff. She got a hair dryer, manicure and pedicure set and all these beauty treatment things.


My sister, who is an art teacher, and needless to say always comes up with very creative gifts made DJ a family tree with all the family pictures from her great grand parents to all her cousins with the history on the back of the piece. Kim was so impressed with it she convinced DJ to hang it at the entrance to our living room and not in her room.
With DJ having her birthday party on Saturday we decided to take her to a local restaurant and just have a quick birthday celebration dinner without any big fancy arrangements. We are taking DJ and 8 of her friends to Pretoria ( about 100km's from Witbank) where she will have her birthday party at a shopping mall where there is an ice rink. The Ice rink have this package whereby the kids can enjoy themselves on the ice and have a birthday party at a restaurant afterwards.
She is really looking forward to it and I think we are in for a real fun day as most of the kids, including Dejone haven't been on Ice before.

On another happy note my brother in law, who's been retrenched by the security company he works for and was suppose to finish end November, was re employed by the new security company that is taking the contract over. The business where he is working is so happy with him that they asked the security company, that is taking over, to employ him so that they can keep him at the business. We are all so happy for him.