First Day of School

These pictures are late, but here is Tommy's first day of school!

Happy Weekend.

Hi everybody. We are plugging along. Tommy finished his first full week of preschool (nursery, as we call it here) yesterday. I talked with Miss Alma at pick up and she commented again on his energy level, and also assured me that he is making friends. She said he is a leader and that even older kids want to do whatever he is doing, and that he's extremely confident. I had been a tiny bit nervous that he didn't seem to be connecting with any of the other kids. Miss Alma also reminded me that it had been less than two weeks... I wonder if it's harder to teach the kids or manage the (neurotic) parents when you're a preschool teacher? Anyway, Tommy spent lots of time in the garden yesterday morning, and wanted to bring home a plastic bag full of weeds. So he did. During the first week, he brought home a picture, and now a bag of weeds. I know he's doing more art, because he often has paint in his hair, but he apparently doesn't care to bring it to me.

This morning Tommy told Eli that he lives in his house in Virginia with Ovie. We miss Ovie.

Tommy's first football class should have been on Wednesday afternoon, but I forgot to take him. Yikes. We went to the playground and I remembered about fifteen minutes before the class was supposed to end, when I noticed some other kids at their football class. Unfortunately, I was at least a 30 minute walk from the field.

We take the bus to preschool and on the bus, Lizzie stares at people until they pay attention to her and then she flirts with them. It's sweet. She likes to look out the window, too, but prefers to interact if possible. She is working REALLY hard on crawling. She's doing a pretty good job sleeping, but we are still rocking her to sleep, and need to just bite the bullet and sleep train her. Perhaps next weekend. This weekend, Eli has a lot of work to do, and sleep training and work are a bad combination. Lizzie discovered yesterday that she just loves pancakes and if you hold one in your hand and don't give it to her, she wails.

Have I commented on our library yet? It's in a pretty old building and it's huge. There are loads of fairly new computers, tons of DVDs (you have to pay 1.50 to rent them for four days), CDs (also a small fee, I think), and of course books. You can recycle batteries there, and also pick up recycling sacks (for your household recycling) if you run out. There is a huge room for kids, and the doors close so you don't have to shush them. And it's less than two blocks from our house. I think we could spend lots of afternoons there once the weather gets bad.

Have a great weekend!

A couple of photos --

Here's Lizzie in her cupcake hat from Aunt Jan & Aunt Jean, getting ready to go for a run:

Tommy at one of London's crazy adventure playgrounds (he's very high, but also very good at climbing):

"My name is Brettandy"

Yesterday after looking at pictures, Tommy announced that his name is "Brettandy." Can any of you guess who was in the pictures? These days he normally goes by "Dozie Ix." Good ol' Doz is a fixer who has a backhoe that goes into outerspace. Typically, after he gets home from outerspace, he digs for a while before eating dinner. He has lots of kittens, five parrots and he used to have two dogs, but yesterday they "deaded." Don't worry, nothing to be sad about apparently (?!).

When I picked him up this afternoon from school, his teacher said, "I don't know how you keep up with him." (As a side note, I do think it's good that he's my first child, because I don't have anything to compare his energy level to.) She said they adore him, but that he is very busy. I figure we are getting our money's worth.

Lizzie is NINE MONTHS OLD TODAY. She is pulling up on things, especially her baskets of toys, and she has some method of moving as well. I'm not sure what it is; I just know she isn't usually where I left her anymore. (My poor second child.) She is mostly busy being totally adorable all the time. She loves bread and makes the biggest messes when we give it to her. She loves her little baby Montessori class and laughs a lot during the singing parts. She is awake now, so I have to go get her. Sorry for the incomplete post...

A few pictures:

Tommy preparing to go to college and the space station:

We had a talk about college being when he will move away from me and Daddy and now college is something of an obsession. The space station is from Curious George.

Lizzie just being cute:

This is what jetlag looks like:

We went to Lizzie's first Montessori class this morning. She just goes for 50 minutes on Tuesdays, and normally her big brother won't come along. But, he starts school tomorrow, so he didn't have anywhere to be except with us. He was a good boy, and Lizzie enjoyed the songs and the big basket full of random objects that she was free to suck on (each baby gets their own basket, and the toys are cleaned each class). One of my friends from the garden is in the class with her baby. And speaking of the garden, we're going back to the garden to play with Leon after naptime...

I hope you all had happy Labor Day weekends.

Imagination

Tommy's all adjusted to being back in London. But he has discovered his imagination, so it's almost like having a different child. Last night, I mentioned that he seemed cross and asked why. He said, "there's a monster." I said, "really?" And he said, "yes, it's out on the roof. It's not a scary monster, it's a nice monster, but it's making me really cross." Oh, well that explains everything. We have multiple conversations like this every day.

Lizzie is having a harder time with the adjustment. But, she feels good enough to practice pulling herself up! Still no teeth and no movement toward crawling. She had a doctor's appointment on Friday and dropped from the 10th percentile to the 9th percentile. The pediatrician isn't worried and I'm not either, but I wish she would eat a little bit more. Tonight she had a piece of garlic bread (and really did eat most of it), so she's on the right track.

We've had a nice weekend. On Saturday we went out to look at wallbeds, but the showroom was closed and we ended up just having lunch. Sunday, we did tons of shopping for the house but didn't get any of the things we needed. And at this point, we are tired of having a house that isn't all set up. Finally, today (a bank holiday!) we went to Regent's Park. There is a fun playground in there and it's pretty easy to get there on the tube. Tommy rode his pink scooter all over which was helpful.

OH! The big exciting news -- and I do mean big -- is that we bought a grill. It's HUGE. Eli's been making delicious dinners on there every night. We had pizza the first night, grilled chicken and vegetables the second, and tapas tonight.

I know, no pictures yet, and I'm sorry. Soon.

We made it.

It's 11:30pm and I'm sitting in our living room with Lizzie who is playing.

We arrived about 12 hours ago. The flight was perfect. Lizzie slept the whole way, with minimal nursing, and Tommy slept about two of the 8 1/2 hours, but he was very good. Tommy is clearly his father's child, as he can skip a night's sleep and still be in a wonderful mood. Our televisions didn't work properly and turned off about every five minutes, so Tommy learned how to turn on "Olivia" all by himself. Once, I woke up and saw him watching sports, but otherwise he did it all by himself. Anyway, it was the best-case scenario, and don't think that I'll count on such good behavior ever again. I know I was LUCKY, as the immigration woman reminded me.

We had such a nice trip, and I promise to post some photos and stories at some point. Tommy got to ride on Robie Pruden's tractor which was fitted like a backhoe, and he got to dig with it. He couldn't believe how lucky he was and kept looking at me with an incredulous expression. We also got to see his friend Margaret's farm, which has chickens and geese and ducks and pigs and sheep as well as all manner of vegetables. My favorite part was the blackberries. It was lots of fun. Anyway, more stories and photos, and house photos will come soon, too, as Eli got lots of work done while we were gone and we're getting close to being photo-ready.

Vacation...

I'm such a bad blogger. But I'm here now, and that's what matters.

We've been busy! On July 20, we flew to Seattle for vacation.

But it is not vacation when your jetlagged children wake up at one am. It just isn't. And if my children didn't exist, I could've taken an ambien to guarantee my own sleep. But after a few rough nights (and days, who am I kidding) we all settled into to my parents' house and started sleeping fairly normally.

We began our vacation with my family. The highlight was seeing Auntie Em and Sid who came from Melbourne. We all went to Jane and John's cabin at Lake Roessiger and had a very good time. One of the best parts was playing Apples to Apples, and if you don't know that game, you should get it and play it because it's fun. We also had fun celebrating Auntie Em's birthday and eating her cake.

Then, we packed the car up and drove to Newman Lake, which is near Spokane. We spent three days there with Eli's family, which was very fun. Tommy loved swimming in Newman Lake (it was much warmer than Lake Roessiger) and he also loved playing with his cousins and Adeline and Claire. He is a tiny bit scary in water because he is relatively fearless and we never know what he's going to do next. I know what I'm going to do next, though: sign him up for some swimming lessons.

Eli had to leave when we returned from Newman Lake, which has been very sad for all of us but especially for Tommy, who cried the whole way home from the airport. "I really need my daddy, mama! I need to go to London now, mama!"

We've been in Seattle this week, mostly working on wearing out my dad. He has been brave, but I think he's pretty exhausted. This was proven today when he managed to take a nap on the living room couch while Tommy, Lizzie and I all played about 10 feet from his head. You have to be pretty tired to nap through Lizzie's shrieking.

He'll get a good chance to rest next week though. On Monday, we are going on a quick trip to Laramie and Lander to spend a little more time with Eli's family. I am excited about the trip but dreading the actual travel -- it will be a lot of car and plane time for these little kids. The secret for Tommy is episodes of Sesame Street on the computer (who knew you could buy Sesame Street on iTunes? Eli, that's who), but for Lizzie it's a tiny bit harder...

I promise to post picture next time or to update our Picasa site. It's embarrassing how behind we are on these things.