The tradition continues...

Yep, still here! Really! Frantically trying to get ready for the holidays and impending full house for the same. We will have furniture in the lounges in time...I hope. 2 weeks and counting and right now we have a rocking chair and a computer chair to sit on. Eeep! Dedicated furniture shopping day tomorrow, so hopefully this will be fixed within the week. Fingers crossed for us! (Apologies to Mom, Dad, and Peter if you're sitting on the dining room chairs or the floor...please know that we will have tried to avoid that scenario.)

Anyway, crazy and unprepared though I may be for the holidays (shopping? For gifts? What's that?! Again, eep!), I have managed to get at least one thing done, even if not to the extent I would have liked. I present to you Maggie's advent calendar:

Yes, I know it's a terrible picture, but it's the best I can do tonight. And yes I know I'm a horrible mother because a) it's all chocolate and b) none of them are wrapped. I almost forgot about the advent calendar, and I haven't managed to unpack the wrapping paper yet. I'd like to think I still get a mom point for getting it done on time (just). I absolutely adore this calendar. My mother made it for me as a kid and I think this is my single favourite Christmas tradition, bar none. Not only is my own mother awesome and always (at least as far as I can remember) made sure that she wrapped each of the gifts, but she also managed to usually have actual gifts rather than copping out and doing chocolate all the way down. I still have a couple of them kicking about. Most of them were small and inexpensive, but still, it was special. So much better than those cardboard calendars with the little pop out windows. Thanks to the world's best Mom for making this and starting the tradition! I'm hoping that Maggie has such fond memories of this calendar. Next year there will be proper gifts on it. There were last year. December just kinda snuck up on me this year. Did you know it comes after November?!

So that's the start of the Christmas season in our house. This is the first year I'm actually hosting my parents. Fingers crossed that I can live up to it!

I knew she was too quiet...

Maggie informed me this afternoon that she wanted to play in her room. She bid me farewell and cheerfully headed up the stairs. I was overjoyed! Could this be the beginning of her independence? She's been very tied to me since we got over here, and while I love my daughter I'd really like to have a little time apart from her. Using the facilities alone would be a fantastic treat! Anyway, off she went to her room, and I settled in to answer some emails and chat with a friend, all without Maggie's not to gentle "help". Bliss! At first I could hear her running around (how does such a small person make so much noise? Honestly!). Then it got really quiet. And then there was a rather loud thump followed by nothing. Uhoh! No crying though, so either she was fine or she was unconscious and I had a real problem. I was just about to fly up the stairs to check on my precious, breakable, delicate flower (*snort*) when I heard her start to sing. Right, okay, the kid's still alive. As I resumed breathing and went back to my emailing and chatting I started hearing what sounded like a radio. Interesting...we don't have a radio on the second floor. My phone maybe? No, that's in my purse and has no music on it anyway. Unless she's downloaded some. Which I wouldn't be at all surprised by. So I sat here puzzling about how she managed to turn on a non-existent radio when it dawned on me that she's managed to get that really irritating Christmas moose out of the cradle. The one I put in there because she's too small to get at it. Hmm. Okay. Fine. It's upstairs, I can't hear it all that well, it's all good. Then I heard more music. And more. She apparently managed to get all three really annoying musical toys out. Okay, still fine. She can listen to them when I'm down here and somewhat insulted from the sound. Back to my email and chat. Or not. That's about when she started calling for me in a somewhat panicked voice. Right. Okay, fine. Off I go up the stairs to see what the problem was. Maggie met me at the top of the stairs with a big grin. I asked her what she needed help with and she cheerfully informed me that she needed me to dance with her. Uhuh. Okay, fine. I can do that. Email will keep. So we head into her room to dance to the "music".  Only to find this:

Eep! The thump was apparently the top of the toy box coming off when she was climbing up to get the irritating toys out of the cradle. The singing was what accompanied the destruction. Now I know. When little miss heads upstairs alone to "play" I will have some work putting things to rights again. It only took me an hour to tidy up the mess that took 10 minutes to make.

This is what the room looks like now. I suspect it will not stay that way long. Ah the joys of a toddler! *grin*

Lest we forget

Today is Remembrance Day. It's a special, somber day for me. It always has been. So of course there was a service in the cards. Today's service, however, was special. Just down the road, in Old Weston, is a church whose cemetery houses 4 Canadians killed when their plane crashed during WWII. The graves have been here, and have been honoured and remembered, since 1944. The plane, however, was just excavated last year, finally allowing a full picture of their last moments to be reconstructed. So today we, along with the entire Canadian community, attended a Remembrance Day service alongside those graves, led by a minister who was a boy in the area during the war and who remembers the day the four men were killed. It was a beautiful day. It was one of the most low key services I can remember. No pomp. Last post was played on someone's iphone. There were no dignitaries. Just a quiet ceremony beside the graves with a single wreath laid followed by mass in the small parish church. It was, without a doubt, the most touching Remembrance Day ceremony I have every attended.

Furniture!

Yesterday we went into town to get groceries and to make the next installment in the great cell phone epic (looong, unimportant saga of first world problems. Long story short I will have a phone tomorrow evening. It only took a week. *sigh*). Anyway, while there we decided to go into the Heat and Stroke furniture store to take a look at what they had. Turns out they had lots that we really, really liked at fantastic prices. So we made our selections, paid for them, paid the whopping 25 pounds for delivery, and had to agree that today would be soon enough (have I mentioned that I LOVE how quickly things are delivered in this country? And how inexpensively. Seriously, 25 pounds to have 10 pieces of furniture delivered the next day? On a sunday? And the guy actually apologized for the price and how long it would take. Honestly! Back home we'd be waiting for a couple weeks and paying through the nose. Love it! So the delivery truck arrived today, well within the delivery window. Not only did they bring us pretty stuff, but they took our old dining table away so we don't have to deal with it. They'll sell it as is, the Heart and Stroke Foundation will get more money out of the deal, and we don't have to figure out how to dispose of it. How is that a bad thing? This is what our dining room looked like when they were done:

Apparently the furniture we selected was all from a store foreclosure or something, so everything is brand new from the factory for a fraction of the price.

Our brand new lovely nesting tables. I have no idea where they will end up, but they were pretty and a great price, so who cares? I'm sure we'll find somewhere to put them to excellent use in one of the two lounges.

Our new coffee table.

One of our 6 new dining chairs.

To go with our new dining room table (with gratuitous cute toddler picture).

And the matching sideboard. I think ultimately we're doing to put wine racks inside this to solve our wine storage issue. I love the grain in the wood and the metal details. So pretty! And all this for under £1000 including delivery.

And finally a picture of Maggie in her father's boots. She seemed to think it would be a good idea to wear them. I thought it was cute.

There are games afoot!

I have (finally) made contact with the local SCA group. RJ met them almost two months ago since that was one of his first orders of business when he got here. Then Maggie and I arrived, life happened, a 2 year old happened, and the SCA fell by the wayside for a while.  That has now been remedied. Nothing major, just games night at someone's house. I didn't even volunteer for anything...much. Just offered to help. That's not really volunteering. I mean, I didn't offer to run an event or cook a feast or anything. Just offered my services in the kitchen if they're wanted. No big deal. No helium hand...yet. *grin*

One of the nicest things about the SCA, as far as I'm concerned, is that you have a ready-made group of people that you will have at least one thing in common with. There is a better than average chance that at least one person in the local group will end up becoming a friend. And if everything goes according to formula, I'm pretty sure that if we need help with something we can probably call on more than one of the people that were there last night and reasonably expect the help we need. The SCA, in my experience, is one big extended family that you didn't know you had. With all the good and bad that goes along with that. Take last night, for example. Usually when meeting a group of 7 complete strangers in one of their homes it's at least a little awkward or uncomfortable. At the very least there's a level of formality there. Not so much last night. Both Maggie and I were immediately comfortable, despite not knowing anyone and being in a completely foreign environment. Within minutes I was chatting with people as though we'd known each other for years. In less than hour I was involved in a discussion about period weaving techniques. By the end of the night RJ and I were both complicit (he more than I...I was just making suggestions) in shenanigans. Awkward? Not at all. Formality? What's that? These are our peeps. For reals.

The next three years are looking significantly less lonely and much more awesome. I'm not entirely certain we're going to want to leave. That's a very, very good thing!