january, 2005

january 23

spent the weekend house hunting after squeezing in a quick visit from nikki and dani, a sports variety class (toby) and a spiderman birthday party. our current thinking is sticking with hamilton since to get somewhere we like in burnaby [eg with a good mountain view] would be more costly, cause a lot of disruption and not be much closer to EA than we already are. still, never say never...

i've decided to pay for some childcare this week so i can actually make some proper progress on the web project i currently have on [and to give me a little bit of time for viewing houses on my own - i think the novelty of that wore off for the children round about saturday afternoon].

talking of children, i'm horrified to announce that toby is now better than me on most playstation games. i really really want to restrict his time playing computer games but as a child of 2 complete childhood computer game addicts [well, actually only 1 of us really ever grew out of it] it feels very hypocritical ie. there's basically no hope!

aly, on the other hand, has apparently lost her magic. she reports that she used to be magic but then lost her magic in grammy and grandad's hotel room she's been telling people that for about a year. i must find out from my dad what exactly happened!

january 19

i'm still seriously considering going back to work full-time but it's such a minefield - not least of all the nightmare that is childcare; 3 different childcare scenarios in fact:

• right now when they are only in preschool 3 afternoons a week
• in the summer when their preschool only runs for 3 weeks
• in september when aly starts kindergarten so will be in school 5 mornings a week and, if he stays at the same place, toby will be in preschool 3 mornings a week

but then maybe it would be better to move both closer to where sascha works and put them in a full-time school. i'm not keen on that solution because i really like the community we're living in right now.

nannies, daycare, private school, public schools, child minding aaaarrrrgggg!

according to the bbc, january 24 is the most depressing day of the year. oh goody - i can't wait!

january 16

he's been! [christmas morning]

happy new year [watching the welsh fireworks from parkgate]

my new year's resolution is to get mine, and my family's health into tip top shape. unfortunately this seems to have resulted in a month's worth of the-only-peace-in-my-week [ie. when the children are at preschool] being horribly interrupted by doctor and dentist visits. oh well.. i'm playing with the idea of getting a proper job this year which means i really should get any and all appointments out of the way while i have the chance.

last year's resolution was to NOT move for a whole year which we, miraculously, managed to stick to. after a whole 18 months in the same house, i'm sure this year will be time for a change :)

it was andrew and nicole's wedding yesterday. a beautiful winter wedding [i think winter weddings are the best - of course, it could never have worked for me because i would have looked too silly with all those sweaters and coats on over my wedding dress]. the children were miraculously well behaved - especially since they were the only children in the church aside from the 3 in the wedding party. unfortunately aly was old enough to kind of take in everything being said which lead to:
[regarding the vicar] "who's that guy?"
[a panicked] "death do they part. WHO'S DYING???" and
"GOD? who's god?" [it's ok though - apparently the 4 year-old ring bearer asked the same question only at the very front of the church!]

the children's room at the wedding reception worked out well. in fact, i think ours were the only children not to wander into the banquet room looking for us. all the children flaked out just after 8 and we had quite a long drive back home [through a couple of inches of new snow which had fallen on already icy roads] so we ended up leaving right after the meal [a fantastic buffet - especially useful for me since i managed to accumulate a huge plate of food which fulfilled my wheat, dairy and egg-free requirements]. it was very strange to be home from a wedding by 9.30pm!

as you can see, i've finally managed to get some recent photos online. hopefully more will follow...

our snowman [which has so far lasted 10 days and counting]

january 8

well, we're back and the fact i haven't managed to update unblog all this time must indicate that i've had a great time.

england was wonderful. we really didn't go anywhere much. i just wanted to hang out with my family and have a nice break which we definitely did. half the family came down with flu, but fortunately not until after an amazing christmas in my dad's sandwich shop [we couldn't all fit in anyone's house], dinner cooked by uncle ron. so anyway, don't be worried if we didn't come and visit you - it was nothing personal ;-p

aly was instantly very very happy to be there [maybe it's being born there!]. toby, on the other hand, had a few reservations. namely - the roads were not big or fast enough - every trip we made he would ask if we were going to go on a big road [instead of country lanes] and he wanted to go back to a canadian bathroom when faced with his first pub toilet [he wasn't very impressed with the fact the toilet was pink, strangely tall, or that it didn't look all that clean. he did have a point]. one day he also noticed that most of the sinks had 2 taps instead of one "hmmmm.. interesting"

the trip began and ended with a few hiccups. neither child slept more than 20 minutes throughout the 20 hours of travel on the way there, but were both pretty good on the flights. however, as we tried to leave the house for the first time on our second day there [for the traditional saturday family coffee meeting] we encountered some problems:

1. i tried [briefly] to drive on the wrong side of the road.
2. the route was blocked by flooding.
3. another country lane was blocked because 2 cars coming in opposite directions had blocked the road and were refusing to move in case the scraped each other [sascha finally negotiated with the driver in the land rover to mount the curb and go around the other person].
4. toby threw up.
we decided to go home and try again another day!!

on the way home:

1. after arriving at manchester airport, BMI wouldn't allow us to check in because 2 of us were flying on british passports and couldn't show that we were leaving the US [our flights terminated in seattle from where we were driving home] DESPITE us all having proof of canadian residency. aaaarrrgh. this meant we needed to buy 2 new airline tickets to vancouver from seattle and check half of our bags to vancouver. very irritating - especially since there was a chance one or both of us would get stuck coming into canada without notarized permission from the other parent to bring the child across the border AND i was going to have trouble managing all the bags i would have to try to get home [of course we couldn't all fly to vancouver because the bloody car was already parked in seattle]. v. annoying.
2. our clever tactic to make sure the children slept on the first leg of the journey, and would therefore be ready for bed at bedtime in vancouver, was to deprive them of much slept the night before. unfortunately this resulted in a major tantrum from aly about an hour into the first flight. fortunately she was screaming in the bathroom for much of it - refusing to come out - and i believe this muffled her impact on the rest of the cabin!
3. upon getting to the US we couldn't find a single person [including customs and immigration] who could think why on earth BMI had made us buy these tickets, so we collected our bags, had them reticketed to ALL go to seattle and then ran [dragging small, tired kids] frantically across one of the world's biggest airports [chicago] to get to the connection we were about to miss.
4. after scraping to our connection we spent an hour on the tarmac whilst the airline tracked down a DOG making a connection from germany which had temporarily been misplaced. said dog was eventually tracked down to a warm holding area.
5. after said irritating dog was on board, there were concerns that the animals might now be too close to the RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL also in the hold!!!!???!!! so we had to wait for an inspector to come and figure that out. we finally made it out of chicago just before an ice storm hit. that's definitely the positive side of things. i think we might have really lost it if we'd been stuck in chicago for another 3 days!
6. at 4AM GMT toby finally fell asleep. unfortunately, this was only an hour before landing in seattle and he had definitely fallen asleep for the night. he was VERY unimpressed when sascha had to move him to pack away the hand baggage and made his feelings very apparent to the rest of the plane. on the bright side, his and aly's little episodes did make me appreciate how amazingly behaved they generally are when we travel.

anyway, everything in between these two 'interesting' parts of the trip was really very good - it's just easier to whine about what wasn't!!! now i've got that off my chest, i'll work on getting some photos online in the next week or so and mentioning some of the better things that we did - of course that will have to wait until i've finished my very long complaint to BMI!

it's good to be back. our jet lag was pretty much sorted straight away in sleep terms, but none of us are really feeling 100% yet. i hope the family flu didn't follow us over here or anything. we're surrounded by a few inches of snow at the moment which is proving to be very entertaining :-) sledding is on the cards for tomorrow which should be great..

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