The week started off with my sons Valedictory service on Monday night.  And his subsequent guest status at the launch of the Official Nelson Mandela Opus on Tuesday. (Read my 2 previous posts)

Wednesday saw the end of our school year (yippee – no more school run for 6 weeks and I get to sleep past 4am)

Thursday – well let me start my story off from here……

Thursday was memorable for more than one thing and has certainly been a memorable one for people all over the world.

We had our staff End-Of-Year lunch function on Thursday afternoon at a place called Gilroys out near Muldersdrift.  We each had to bring a R50 (about $5) gender neutral gift.  So after ordering our first round of drinks, we assembled all the gifts on a table.  Each person had to pick a gift from the table and open it.  If you didn’t like your gift, you could swop it with anyone else’s gift within 30 seconds.  So this provided quite a bit of entertainment.  Some of the more popular gifts were:

The most popular gift which was swopped out many a time

Another popular gift – emergency kit consisting of clown nose, bowtie and hanky

And a notepad that provided hours of entertainment

Once the gifts were all opened, we had to move to another table under cover as it looked like it was going to rain.  Someone then started off a game – It had to do with the notebook above.   A basic picture was drawn and the notepad was passed around and we each had to add to it.  This provided loads of giggles all round and was a load of fun.

The before picture

The after picture

Then it started to rain – hard!.  There was another group of people sitting near us under cover – they were obviously also having their end of year function and their group were all still arriving.  There was a little bit of a walk from the carpark to the venue so they were all rather soaked by the time they got to their tables.  Of course by now we were in a rather festive spirit and decided to have a “Wet T-shirt shirt/blouse competition”.  We quickly drew up some numbers on the back of the menu’s that were left laying around and we started scoring their guests as they arrived.

Scoring at it’s best!

After this, it was time for a late lunch which was awesome.  There is nothing better than a pub lunch.  By this time the other group sitting behind us had had rather far too much too drink and were very rowdy so we asked to be moved to another area.

The rest of the afternoon was spent just having good fun and being entertained with a few jokes by our host (Owner of the bar who looks just like Father Christmas).

Most of our group left late afternoon and a few of use were left lingering over some coffee and chatting for a few hours.  It was a very pleasant afternoon.

I eventually got home around 7.30pm in the evening.  Little did I know the day would offer more surprises.

I spent the rest of the evening relaxing and chatting to a few friends via social media.  Eventually to bed.  I had just dozed off when my phone went DING.   It was late – just gone midnight and I thought it strange that someone was messaging me at this time of night.

So curiosity got the better of me and I had a look at who it was.  It was Son no 3 who was currently staying over at a friends house.  The message read was as follows:

And this is how I found out that the Father of our Nation, Nelson Mandela had died.  It came as a huge shock.  My son was upset – his icon had died and he had not had the opportunity to meet him as yet.

I quickly nudged dead hubby who had been fast asleep for ages.  He woke with a fright and was very shocked by the news.  Hubby is the COO of the stadium where the memorial service is to be held at so he spent the rest of the night on the phone with various people putting plans into action.

I don’t think anyone got much sleep on Thursday night.  We all knew this moment would arrive and we were all prepared, but little did we know it would come as a shock regardless.