Life has been good for the past couple of weeks. This has everything to do with happy boys enjoying a jam-packed summer, working in an air-conditioned office and a busy bakery. The past year has been fraught with all kinds of challenges for us and most days we have just had to roll with it. I'm always grateful when we have a few weeks of respite and can just be normal mensch again.
Which I can't say for the rest of the world which has seemingly gone completely insane.
Tyler and I realised that - unlike our own childhoods - the boys are not growing up surrounded by news in the house. We stream TV and pick programmes as opposed to watching a channel and we both download newspapers online because of the lack of international newspapers on the island. We therefore consume news individually and although we chat about it to each other, the boys have remained oblivious to world events. So we felt we needed to rectify this and all sat down together on Monday to watch the BBC News before supper.
Of course the two main leads were MH17 and Gaza.The children were horrified. Amongst many other questions over dinner, William asked "if you are killed in a war does this mean you are actually dead?" To anyone over about 30 years old this would seem like a ridiculous question, but in video war games being killed dosn't necessarily mean that you cease to exist, you can come back from the dead. The boys were also bewildered why children their own age were being blown up in Gaza. It literally made no sense to them at all.
I immediately felt that maybe we hadn't done the right thing by exposing the children to such rawness. The BBC is always careful in its reporting and provides factual news as well as opinion, so nothing that they had seen was lurid or sensationalist.
Nevertheless, they were all visibly shaken by what they had seen and heard. It was hard to watch the children trying to compute such insanity. We couldn't even give them semi-coherent explanations in the face of such incomprehensible events.
On reflection however we believe that we have done the right thing. The children are a part of this world and are about to re-enter the mainstream again, so to speak. Backwaters, whilst quiet are also murky - so we have our fair share of issues here albeit in a more parochial way. The boys also do not live in an idyllic island bubble. They've had to deal with bullying and racism and see first hand the desecration of the reefs and the near extinction of their beloved frogs. They've also seen how hard it has been to build our new lives here and so they do understand that it's not all roses the whole time.
We don't have Gaza or MH17 or hijackings though. In some ways it makes us appreciate our little backwater even more (until we have to get on a plane again, that is) but it is The World, and not a video game and William hopefully understands that now. We're also getting back to our TED evenings, which the boys loved and which focuses more on the positive and the rational.
We have ONE MORE WEEK until we close the bakery shop and take a little break ourselves. We are planning on sailing to Anegada for a few days, weather permitting and doing some hiking in the St John's National Park. Then we have to knuckle down to fixing things and sorting stuff out and get going on our new premises.
So we're stepping off the world for a week and I'm going to take a short break from the blog and we'll see you on the other side of Summer.
Hasta la vista x
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