Growing up in the bush

Our children have a fantastic childhood here in the bush. They grow up in this beautiful nature, in a country where they can almost always play outside and in a place where they have lots of space to play. From the moment they started crawling they have been getting healthily dirty and their daily bath was never a luxury. Now they get a little bigger they can run around, play football, build huts and in a few weeks time it will be warm enough to swim. They love going with Daddy in the bakkie (pick-up) to bring the garbage bags to the dumpster at the gate and our old Landrover is their favourite. Yesterday we drove at the end of the afternoon  

with the whole family in the Landrover to take Nicolus, our bar- and handyman, to the gate. The kids loved it, on our way there we saw a lot of giraffes and on the way back we also saw waterbuck and zebras. Dennis was very enthusiastic; Niels is more used to it already. On our way to school we regularly see animals and not so long ago he went on his first real game drive here in Balule. We had guests with a little girl of 6 and since I was joining them on the game drive Steve (the guide) said that Niels could come along as well. During the game drive he was very quiet, but last week I heard him boasting to his little brother that he had been on game drive with Steve already. With school they have also been on a game drive and sometimes he can come with when we hear the lions very close by. While the guests sometimes get a little nervous when the lions come very close to the open vehicle, Niels just watches very calmly. They are real bush-children and almost always walk on bare feet. They are very conscious about nature already. They already are interested ion the Moon and stars and Niels regularly makes his own “telescope”. They love watching animals and are very interested in tracks already. Maybe one day there will be a time that they rather play videogames and maybe they don’t want to live in the bush when they grow up, but nobody can take away this childhood from them.

Regards from the bush
Miriam