The Lord Builds the House!

Heidi-Mari and I made another scrapbook double page!  

Since December, Heidi-Mari takes part in the Friday Sketchers Challenge and we are making cards on our Monday nights together.  We enjoy the card making so much.  In contrast to making a scrapbook double page that normally took us 4-6 weeks to complete, we can finish a card every Monday night! It is also nice to have hand made cards ready for birthdays, special occasions and saying thank you.

But I’ve missed making scrapbook pages, so when it was certain Christo is moving the Health shop to bigger premises, we started to plan a new double page of the family for his office.  

Eighteen months ago we’ve made a double page of the then, seven children.  

Daniel was only 2 months old at that stage.  

That double page was outdated with Michael’s arrival and Christo asked us several times when we were going to make him a new double page. The move was the ideal opportunity!

Since it was made as a surprise and we couldn’t ask Christo to help with the print of the photo’s (it was the first time I printed photo’s from my MAC Book Pro) we had a few challenges!  But with LOTS of prayer we’ve managed. 

The past three weeks Christo and the two big boys, worked late almost every evening, doing the shop fitting of the new shop themselves.  We’ve missed them a lot, especially the little ones, since they didn’t understand where daddy or their older brothers were. 

But it gave Heidi-Mari and me the change to work on the double page, without Christo expecting anything.

I love Ps 127 and decided to give this double page a title from this beautiful psalm on the family.  

The title: The Lord builds the House.

“Unless the Lord builds the house,

They labor in vain who build it;

Unless the Lord guard the city,

The watchman stays awake in vain.

It is in vain for you to rise up early,

To sit up late,

To eat the bread of sorrows;

For so He gives His beloved sleep.

Behold children are a heritage from

the Lord.”

In our family this verse is the testimony of our lives!  It isn’t Christo and I who are providing for our children, it is the Lord!  We’ve experienced with the addition of every child how the Lord was enlarging our territory, giving us more influence and blessed us more financially!  

As photo’s on the double page, we’ve used the first picture taken of our eight children, the day after Michael’s birth; 

Our first family photo taken on my birthday and 

Eight single photo’s of each child.  When I chose each child’s photo, I tried to capture each child’s personality in the expression on their face. 

We didn’t need to buy anything for this double page!  All the pages we’ve used was beautiful pages we’ve bought over a period of time.  We enjoyed making it so much and it felt like old times again!

On Friday night, the shop fitting was finished and Christo and the boys where home for dinner.  How I’ve missed the dinner table this last few weeks!  It is so easy to take it for granted.  The dinner table is truly a place far more than just feeding our physical bodies.  It is a place to feed us emotionally and spiritually too.  Although I’ve still prepared dinner as usual  (I took the men’s supper to the shop every evening) and could still feed the children without dad, it wasn’t possible for me to feed them emotionally and spiritually, as we are used to. The Man of the house and their daddy, was not at the dinner table. 

Just before dinner on Friday night, when Christo sat with the boys on his lap, Heidi-Mari gave him the double page.  

Over this weekend they are moving the shop and 

On Monday morning they will open the new shop’s doors!  Then the new double page will hang in Christo’s office.

He likes it, and it will fit perfectly in his new office, serving as a reminder of how much we love him, how proud we are that he is our daddy and my husband and how thankful we are for the hours he works very hard to look after us!

A New Hobby for Heidi-Mari and Me

For Heidi-Mari’s ninth birthday I enrolled us for four basic scrapbook lessons. I could never have imagined how many memory making and creative evenings we would have from that day onwards with our scrapbooking. Here I’ve shared how our Once-a-Week-Scrap-book-Evenings changed our relationship into a deep Mother-Daughter-Friendship.

Over the past three and a half years we’ve made the most beautiful scrapbook pages during hours of relaxed conversations.

One of our first pages!















Heidi-Mari invested a lot in her scrapbooking. A year after we started, during her tenth year, she had saved enough money to buy herself a Scrapbook cutting machine – the Silhouette.

With the Silhouette we entered a new level of scrapbooking. We could cut words, shapes, borders and many more! We once bought these paper dolls on-line and made the most beautiful cards with the paper dolls we cut with her silhouette machine.








A few months ago I followed the link to a card making blog on a friend’s blog. I showed Heidi-Mari and we started looking into some more card making blogs. We where hooked! There were the most beautiful, creative ideas for card making. There and then we decided to make a little shift in our scrap booking and try our hand at card making.

One of our first cards – a Welcome-Baby card for a friend

At this blog Heidi-Mari spotted the Sugar Nellie stamps for card making. After careful investigation we bought 10 Sugar Nellie stamps from Scotland. No supplier for these beautiful stamps in South Africa. We searched the internet to see how to colour these beautiful stamps and got hold of watercolor pencils at a local shop in Durbanville.

Now Heidi-Mari is painting to her hearts desire and supplies us with the most beautiful stamps for our hand made cards.








Here are the first two cards we made on Monday night, using the Sugar Nellie stamps.

The oval scalloped shape we designed ourselves on our silhouette. I am foreseeing hours of fun and creativity with this new hobby of us!!

Heidi-Mari's 12th Birthday!

On Saturday Heidi-Mari turned 12years old. My little baby girl, is transforming into a beautiful swan.

I’m entering a season where I have the joy of seeing and picking the fruit of years of hard work in my young daughter. For this birthday I didn’t buy her birthday presents, I’ve decided to make her birthday presents. I wanted her to experience my gratitude for her serving helping attitude in the house. Heidi is never too tied to help me with chores in the house. Never too tired to help a little one. Never too tired to take care of our babies. And especially when I'm pregnant, she constantly has her antennas out to pick up when I'm not feeling too well, although I try to keep my pose.

I've made her a beautiful, pink skirt and two aprons. The one apron is white with pink strawberries - her tea apron and the other a bright, multi-coloured apron, for preparing food. I've made these aprons while she was helping Daddy in his health shop and it was such a big surprise to her.












On Saturday night we (Christo and I) took her out for dinner. We started this tradition with CJ’s 10th birthday. From around the age of 8 years, they don’t have parties with lots of friends anymore; instead we took the birthday boy or girl out for dinner. The siblings stay with a babysitter and he or she has the privilege of a whole evening exclusively with Mom and Dad in a nice restaurant, enjoying delicious food and good service.

This time it wasn’t only Christo and me blessing the birthday girl, the Lord blessed Heidi-Mari and Christo and I could share in the blessing! It was the first time we visit this cosy, Italian restaurant in the middle of the Durbanville residential area and what a pleasant surprise. The restaurant is in an old wine cellar, the second oldest building in the Cape (the oldest building in the Cape being the Castle!) The thick white walls, high ceiling, big old wine barrel and the fire in the huge fire place gave it a unique, warm and friendly atmosphere. As we were half way through our meal the owner of the restaurant (an Italian in his 60’s) and an accordionist entered the restaurant and started to sing classic, Italian songs. It was awesome! He sang songs like Oh Solo Mio (my dear husband’s absolute favourite!) As he passed our table, he spotted Heidi and started to sing for her!

After the first song, he asked if there were any birthdays in the restaurant. There were three more people celebrating their birthdays, but he started with Heidi-Mari! It was so special. He sang her a beautiful Italian song, then asked her name and asked the whole restaurant to sing along, Happy Birthday. Obviously she was (more than) a little uncomfortable with all the attention and blushed tomato red, but it was so beautiful.

The food was excellent and Christo could drink a real Italian espresso – the perfect ending to a nice meal.

Then on Monday, as part of her birthday, the two of us went to the Scrapbook Shop in High Street for a whole day of scrapping. Daddy took the day off at the Health Shop (a real sacrifice) and he and CJ baby-sat the little ones. It was such a blessed day. We decided before hand on the lay out of the double page we would make and got all the photo’s ready. Heidi-Mari wanted to make a scrapbook page on how she grew up, using pictures of each birthday over the last 12 years.

We had a ball! We choose the exact paper, to fit with our theme and colour scheme from the many shelves of scrapbook paper in the shop,












and as the page progressed, we could pick and choose embellishments to beautify our double page.








Half way through the day, at 12h00 we went to the next door coffee shop and had a delicious lunch. It was a typical, cold, rainy Cape Winter day, and we had butternut cream soup and chicken pancakes with a cheese sauce. Add with it the relaxed conversation of two best friends – it was perfect.

How special to have my budding girl, becoming one of my best friends. To share hobbies, but also the business of life! With Heidi-Mari I don’t need to be someone else, to impress my friend. I can just be me, her mother. After 12 years she knows all her mothers weak points… but still loves me. I appreciate her love and friendship more and more as she’s grows up. Like a real friend she knows what stress me, she knows what makes me sad and she knows what makes me happy.

For the rest of the afternoon we scraped to our hearts desire! We almost finished our double page by 16h45,

before we headed home, to my loving, caring husband and my wild, lively boys and little girl! At home even more blessings were awaiting us. Daddy prepared us the most exotic supper! Lamb shoulder in a red wine, garlic and fig sauce, rice and spelt, a ratatouille vegetable dish and slices of butternut, brushed with olive oil and baked in the oven (CJ’s speciality).

Heidi-Mari quickly put on her apron and made us a delicious fresh salad.

This was the perfect ending to a perfect day!

Thank you Lord, for such a blessed weekend, celebrating Heidi-Mari’s 12th birthday!

This is my prayer for you:
29 “Many daughters have done well,
But you excel them all.”
30 Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.
Prov 31:29,30

May the Lord grant me the wisdom to teach my daughter to fear the Lord!

Making Memories

The day our little girl was born, was one of the most joyful and thankful days of our life. Our firstborn was a boy and now… a little girl.

A Girl to dress in pink, a girl to play dolls with, a girl with whom I could have tea and cake when she grew up, a girl to plan a wedding for one day, a girl who would become my best friend. She was my second baby and with the optimism of a young mother, I believed I was prepared for all the changes and challenges a new baby could bring to the house. I was confident and looked forward to taking my newborn baby home.

After two days at home, I realized that she was crying far more than I could remember my first born ever doing. She would start complaining with her little voice at eight and nothing could stop the increasing pitch of her cries.

When she was 5weeks old, CJ turned three years. I remember decorating the living room for his birthday party, the night before his birthday, with a screaming baby. That night I had to admit to myself, my little girl, was a colic baby! It was a terribly, fearful moment in my life. My sister was a colic baby. I was 5years old when she was born and I could clearly remember the effect my sister’s cries had on my mother. Would I be able to handle this baby?

Many days I just could not take it any longer. I would call the babysitter or a neighbour and just leave her for an hour or so to go and sit on a bench in the park, sobbing in hopelessness. What had happened to my expectations for this little girl? I thought that I must have been doing something wrong, as she did not want me. That was my main concern that she didn’t want me…

Over the following months she developed eczema. At 6 months her body was as raw and red as liver and pus came oozed out of her skin.

I visited a homeopath who immediately told me she was allergic to dairy and MSG. These ‘toxins" entered her body through my breastmilk. That whole idea was foreign to me. I was a qualified Dietician and never had anyone ever taught me that the mother had to watch her diet when she breastfed. Only chocolate and coffee could reach the baby through the breastmilk. I immediately stopped drinking milk and eating cheese, ice cream, cream and all processed foods loaded with MSG. As time went by, we also learnt that I had to avoid wheat products. Read more...

Gradually my baby’s condition improved, but the scars were there. The damage was done. I remember looking at my sweet little baby, that didn't cry any more from seven in the morning till seven at night, wishing I could just turn back time and prevent her from crying so much in those early days.

As time passed by, this sweet little baby became a toddler and a beautiful little girl, but I was so startled by those first few months, that real bonding didn’t take place.

For years I cried out to the Lord, to please restore our relationship, to please wipe out the memories of those first few months! My husband prayed for years, for the restoration of our relationship. And then just before her ninth birthday, it hit me. We had to start doing something together, just the two of us. We needed to spend time together building new memories.

She was now the most beautiful young girl and she wanted to please me with everything she did. It was my greatest desire to love this girl with all my heart. But what could we do, and how were we going to do it with three smaller children and baby number six on the way? One afternoon, while driving home from a mall, pondering on what I could buy her for her ninth birthday, I saw a big advertisement on scrapbooking. I didn’t have an idea what it was, but the advert said, 'The Newest Hobby'! I love to be creative and decided to stop at this “Scrapbook Shop”. And there my journey with my little girl changed and years of prayer were answered. The lady at the Scrapbook Shop was so friendly and helpful and on my girl's 9th birthday we gave her some scrapbooking tools. I also arranged for the two of us to take an introductory course on scrapbooking. So, off we went. Today, almost 3years since we started scrapbooking once a week for 2 hours, we have made the most beautiful pages filled with memories.

But more importantly, we started building new memories by sharing this precious time together. Many nights we would start scrapbooking and by the end of the night she would have shared her dreams and hopes with me. We’re now best friends!

I have realized how important it is to let every child know, that we want to spend time with them, that we want to be with them, that we don’t just love them, we also like them. They must experience that they are special.

They are God’s gift to us.
Through our scrapbooking evenings, I’ve sacrificed time, to be with her. The time I’ve invested in these evenings, will reap a harvest that I can’t comprehend now. In the very near future she’s going to be a young woman, and I want to be the one that she trusts with her dreams and fears. I believe these Scrapbooking evenings are going to be the key to her dreams and fears.

I once read:
“Love is to gently run your hands over someone’s soul, till you find a crack, and then fill that crack with your love, for it to heal.”

Through our Scrapbooking evenings I am able to keep my hand on her heart, ready to fill it with love, whenever she needs it.

I do not miss my Monday nights of scrapbooking with my daughter for anything in the world!