More Information than Necessary

I have high hopes that I will be able to update with the Ireland story soon - Michelle requested that she be the one to pick out the pictures, so I'm letting her do that, and then I'll try to post our tale.

In other news, we are in fact, slowly settling in - I spent my first (mostly full) week at work this past week, we finally got phone service, and we've got our utilities sorted. Our house is beginning to take shape again, although it still resembles this:

This picture comes from about a week ago, when I was first putting the boxes into appropriate categories for figuring out which ones were important enough to warrant immediate opening.

All kidding aside, we are very much in "unpacking mode", and while we've made significant progress in normalising our lives, there is still plenty to do. All of this doesn't make for interesting blogging though, so I thought I would share a little story of Mother's Day.

My kids are generally pretty excited about birthdays and other holidays, including Mother's Day. So, yesterday morning, we all came in to give Mich her Mother's Day cards and the things that the kids had prepared for her. Maggie gave her a card that she had made which had several drawings in it. Interestingly, quite a few of the drawings had been covered over with dark blue marker. Of course, we asked Maggie why this was, and Maggie patiently explained that this was because there had been a thunderstorm and the lights had gone out, so we couldn't see very well. It was also quite clear that Maggie is our resident snugglebug, as several of the statements in the card were things like: Mommy likes it when I hug her. I like it when Mommy hugs me. It was just very Maggie-esque, and if you know Maggie, then you know what that means.

Mother's Day

Continuing on with our string of unusual holidays, we celebrated Mother's Day yesterday. In yet another difference between the US and the UK, Mother's Day was celebrated in the UK yesterday. Interestingly, Father's Day is the same. However, other than the unusual date of the holiday, the weekend, and the week preceding, were rather normal - or at least as normal as life in our family can be.

We had hoped to at least go out on Sunday, but unfortunately, our train station was closed for maintenance work. When that happens, they replace the train with a bus to the nearest open station, which, in this case, was Purley. And so, we didn't go anywhere. I suppose I did go up the street and buy some milk and bread, but that was it.

In other news, we are, much to our chagrin, looking at moving. We found out earlier this week that our landlord is unlikely to allow us to renew our lease for more than six months, and may not allow us to renew the lease at all, as he thinks he will need the house again. As you can probably imagine, this has created some heightened stress levels in the household, although if you know us, you can also probably imagine who is stressing the most.

I apologise for the short post, but that's all that really comes to mind at the moment. Maybe some more later?