Life and Times of the Fireflies: Summer Highlights

The kids are really growing up in an era of instant gratification! Online shopping, internet banking, email, instant messaging...Everything is easily and instantly accessible with a few clicks of the fingertips without ever having to weather the inconvenience of queue. And without the grounding of the slower paced existence like I stem from (snail mail and the likes), I feel like we are raising an impatient generation!

This was particularly evident on one particular day during the Summer holidays. We had planned to take the kids to Hout Bay for a boat trip, but as fate would have it, numerous people intended to soak up the Cape Town sun in a similar fashion and our trek ended up fruitless. While the adults seemed happy to find an alternate plan, the kids seemed restless and frustrated...tell tale signs of the infiltration of the new age system of instant gratification....in this case, the lack thereof!

With plan B not quite turning out the way we intended, we headed off to destination C. Stuck in traffic on a glorious Summer day was nobody's idea of fun and I was ready to steer my car in the direction of home instead, the moaning voices on the backseat and a low cell phone battery (I do not have a car charger) doing nothing to help curb the frustration.

In the last hope of salvaging the day, we made it to the Waterfront just in time for a late afternoon boat trip, a due reward after a trying afternoon. Perhaps the biggest reward was the lesson learnt. That everything doesn't come easy. Life isn't a one way cruise... That some things are worth the wait! I suppose Patience was definitely the underlying theme of this day and boy oh boy was it a worthy lesson for the kids (and me) to learn :-)