Thanksgiving 2 (the Return)

Last night, we went over to some friends' house for another Thanksgiving dinner. There were six of us (plus two kids). Ironically, it both of the other couples the wife is American. The people hosting have an 18 month old son named Joshua. While we were getting the last things taken care of and getting dinner on the table, he and Anna were playing. It was the cutest thing. He would show her his toys and they would kind of play together. At one point, they were in the hall and he gave her a paintbrush (they are renovating their house).

This time, Anna was able to eat. She really liked the stuffing. I'm not really sure how much she ate but we also gave her mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, turkey and roll. Her favorite part may have been smearing it all in her hair. In the future, we will have to remember that sweet potato makes a great gel.
After dinner, Joshua grabbed a brussel sprout out of the kitchen and was carrying it around. Naturally Anna wanted it and took it from him (she's assertive like that). When he couldn't get it back from her and was getting pretty upset, we got him his own. The two of them proceeded to eat their brussel sprouts (yes, these are raw brussel sprouts). Anna only took a couple of bites and spit most of it back out but Joshua went all out and ate the whole thing! It was expecially amazing because he didn't really eat his dinner.

After sitting around a bit and cleaning up a bit, we had pie. I love pumpkin pie and Anna seems to take after me in that regard. We gave her a little piece and when she was done with that and wanted more, we cut another small one and she ate almost all of that too. Of course, can you blame her? Pumpkin pie is pretty much wonderful. After more sitting around, talking and being full, we headed out. We didn't get home quite so late this time but it was still past Anna's bedtime. At this rate, she may never get over her cold. Oh well, it was a lot of fun.

Thanksgiving Across the Pond

Our Thanksgiving this year was a bit odd. A number of Jason's class mates got together and had dinner on Thursday. It was a bit strange because it felt like a holiday to me (cooking and thinking of the meal that evening) but no one else in the city got the memo. They were treating it like any other Thursday. I kept worrying about stores being open and trains running at the usual time but of course, there was no problem.

Watching football. It wasn't always just the men, the women would be in and out while cooking.

So after Jason's classes we went over to the flat of some girls in his class. One of them is a big football fan so they had it playing on her laptop in the living room while finishing dinner in the kitchen. Anna had a lot of fun crawling around the new place. They had spinach dip which she quite enjoyed. Interestingly enough, she liked celery too. We gave her some and she would just chew on it.

The women in the kitchen.

I was pretty impressed with what they put together. Their kitchen is pretty small and, as with all furnished apartments, sparse. Even so, there was a lot of food and it was all really good. The place got really hot though. The windows were open and everything but it was pretty bad. It's times like this that you wonder why you use your heater at all, just make casseroles for dinner.

Jason on carving duty.

Unfortunately, since they still had class, dinner was a little on the late side. We kept trying to have Anna take a nap but she wouldn't sleep. I would try to put her down and the next thing I know, she is crawling around the bedroom. Oh well. It finally hit when we put her in her seat to eat (at 10:00!) and she just couldn't take it. She did manage to eat a little bit (quite enjoyed the cranberry sauce) before sleep overcame her.

I saw that and took a picture, Jason saw that and got her out and laid her down. So her first Thanksgiving and she didn't even make it to the turkey let alone pie. Fortunately, she had the next day to look forward to.

Dinner Table Conversation at Our House

Here is Anna working on making new sounds. Every time she does this, Jason just cracks up. One night at dinner, he decided to reply and they had a whole conversation going. It was just too cute.

No One Likes Snot

Especially not people who are too young to blow their own nose. That's right, Anna has a cold poor kid. She actually had one a little bit ago and after it had gone away for a couple of days, she got another (or did it come back and is actually an ear infection, who knows?). A part of me blames the Toy Library. Not everyone adheres to the whole "don't bring your kids if they have a yucky nose" thing. Regardless of who is actually to blame, we are now in sick baby mode.

For the most part, she is doing well. She is still often happy and active. The problem is that with her snotty nose, she is having a hard time sleeping but is often tired. As a result, she is taking a lot of short naps. This morning, it was only 20 minutes! Another impediment to her sleeping is she has developed a cough. I think it hurts her throat too because often she will cough and then cry. Nighttime is hit and miss. She's been waking up more but goes back to sleep really easily. I often just have to rock her for a bit and sing a song and she is right out again.

This has quite changed the schedule of our days. Often I don't shower or get dressed right away and often take a morning nap. Jason has been a huge help with this. I love that he is home in the mornings with his schedule. Today we aren't going site-seeing like we usually do on Wednesdays (also because we are going into town tomorrow for Thanksgiving but more on that later). I did still manage to get out of the house yesterday and I think Anna liked it too.

One kind of good thing about all of this is that I'm getting pretty good with the snot sucking. Naturally, Anna hates this and has even taken to trying to keep me away with her hand. I like to think she enjoys it after it is done and she can breathe better but who knows. Either way, I kind of enjoy doing, aside from all the crying and wiggling. In the same way that I enjoy popping zits, I get kind of excited when I'm able to get snot out and often want to try just one more time. Hopefully she gets over this soon.

Rubbish

I have yet to understand the garbage pick up in our area. We have two bins outside our door, one has a blue top and is for recycling and the other one is green and is for garden and food waste. Do you see the problem? Apparently everything else goes in black bags (they have implemented a black topped bin but it's optional and we don't have room for it). The blue and green topped bins get picked up once a week and the black bags get picked up once every two weeks. This sounds simple enough as long as I don't forget which week is the black bag week.

The real problem is that picking up part. Our bins sit just off of our walk way right inside our gate. The truck comes by pretty early Monday morning and as far as I can tell, we don't have to put the bins out. See, the truck goes down the street with two people walking behind it. These people go, get your bin out of your yard, put it on the truck and put it back on the sidewalk in front of your house. This sounds all well and good but some weeks they don't get the bin out of our yard. I don't know if this depends on who is walking behind the truck that week or on how full our bin is.

The black bags are more of a problem. When we fill our can in the house, I take the bag out and just put it outside the front door and kind of behind our bush. The first week we had that there, the trash guy just got it from right in front of our house. I figured it was like the bins and I didn't have to put it out. Except that they don't always get it and as they only come fortnightly it can be bad if it's not picked up. Generally, I can tell if it's the black bag week by seeing other people's bags in front of their houses so I'm working on putting it on the sidewalk.

Another real problem is the garden and food waste. The council has provided little green buckets for our kitchen counter to keep the peelings and what not until we put them in the big green bin. This is all well and good but they don't want plastic bags in the green bin. At first I just didn't worry about it and put the food in the bucket then in the bin. Unfortunately, we don't have that many peelings and they can sit in the bucket for some time. I won't go into details but the bucket gets quite rank. So I gave up for a bit and just used grocery bags (surely everyone didn't put up with this) and put them in the bin when it was full. It still smelled but it didn't leave a lingering smell on the bucket even after it was cleaned. But then the trash people didn't empty our bin and put a note on it saying it was only for garden waste, no plastic bags and that they would send someone else to empty it. Apparently, they check your bin before they empty it! I think they are being unreasonable but I guess I just have to empty the bucket more often and not think about my stinky bin.

Oh the Possibilities

Anna has learned a new skill, she can now open the kitchen cabinets. Fortunately, in our current kitchen, we only have two cabinets that are at her height so there isn't too much to get into. One of them is where we keep the laundry soap so I put her car seat in front of it to keep her out of there. The other one, she can play in. It has tupperware, the onions and potatoes and other random things that we inherited with the flat.

She really only went in the cabinet when she first opened. Now she brings things to her rather than going to them.

She loves going in there. Now she doesn't mind playing on the floor while I make dinner which is always a good thing. When she first discovered she could get in there, she started playing with the head of garlic. She has pulled off a lot of the papery wrapping and chews on the top. In fact, since it's a kind of old head of garlic, is has little sprouts and she likes to chew on those! I guess she takes after her grandma Abbott with her love of garlic.

Yummy garlic

Lately she has been having fun with the potatoes and onions. She pulls them out of their bags and scatters them everywhere. I don't like her playing with the potatoes because they have dirt on them (side note, the potatoes here have lots of dirt on them as if they aren't cleaned before put in the bag and sent to the store) so I closed the bag with a clip. She still has the onions though and loves them. I haven't noticed her chewing on them yet but I think it's only a matter of time.

A Day Trip from Bath

From Bath we took a bus tour into the surrounding area. Since it was only an afternoon tour we only had time for two stops: Stonehenge and Lacock. We went with a Mad Max tour. It was on a big van that seats about 15 people. They provided a car seat for Anna and our driver/tour guide was great.

It only took about an hour to get to Stonehenge. Once we got there, we again got audio guides and out tour guide bought all of our tickets (after we gave him the money) so we didn't have to worry about that part. By this point I was pretty audio guided out. Add to that that while we were driving there, we listened to a tape that talked about the place and I realy didn't listen to the audio guide much at all. I mean, how many times can you hear about how hard it was to get the stones there, how we don't know how they got them up and have no idea what it was used for. Maybe they said more than that in the audio guide but I wasn't in the mood to listen enough to find out.

Unfortunately, a few years ago, the National Trust decided that people shouldn't be able to walk right up to the stones anymore. So they put up a rope and we couldn't get too close (Jason did say he would give me 30 pounds if I would run up and touch it ut I couldn't run as I had Anna in the wrap). They did let us walk all the way around it which was nice to be able to see it from all angles. It was kind of a gray day but it wasn't as cold or windy as I had feared. I guess a part of me was a touch disappointed in the way that you always are when something is totally hyped up and then you go there to find it smaller than expected and looks just like the pictures. Looking back I'm glad I went and thought it was pretty cool.

We spent about an hour total there but only about 30-40 minutes actually looking at the rocks. When we were done, we got hot chocolates and I was downright how when we got back in the van to move on. As a side note, I totally burned my mouth on the hot chocolate in fact, it still hurts a little bit. I have no idea how coffee drinkers do it. Someone should tell them that your mouth isn't supposed to feel like this all the time.

The next spot was a town called Lacock which is a National Trust Village. The village is about a thousand years old and has stayed small and cute. In fact, it was used in the six hour Pride and Prejudice as Meryton as well as a couple of houses have been used in Harry Potter movies. It was only about 30 minutes in the car, just enough time for Anna to fall asleep, and were only going to be there for about 30 minutes. Since we didn't want to wake Anna up, I stayed in the car while Jason walked around for about 15 minutes then he stayed with her while I walked around. By this point it was getting dark but it was still fun to walk around.

The inside of a cool old barn.

Then it was back in the van to go back to Bath. Our driver had all kinds of fun anectdotes such as pointing out the hill where Peter Gabriel got his inspiration for the song Salisbury Hill and we even got to listen to it. We talked about thatch roofs for a while. Apparently, if you have one, you can't change it anymore because the houses that still have them are registered. Plus, if you do have one, you have to have a taller than normal chimney so the sparks don't burn down your house. There is a lock system that at one point has 21 locks and it takes something like 9 hours to get to the top because it's all hand pumps and the like. That takes determination.

Near the church, this is where they used to have the market at least once a week. Notice how the step just to the left of the car is completely worn down to nothing. The steps in the BYU library look like newbies next to that.

After getting back to Bath and having dinner, we went to catch our train. The trip was going great, Anna was walking down the aisle and making friends while Jason slept when we hit something then stopped suddenly. After we came to a stop, you could smell brakes. We didn't know what was going on for a while (this is when Jason woke up quite confused). Then we found out that a freight train passing us had something hanging off the side and that was what we hit. It broke two windows in our car and we had to stop at the nearest station to change trains. After we stopped, I looked at the windows and they had actual holes while the whole pane was cracked. I don't think anyone was hurt.

We waited on the platform for a little while until another train came to pick us up. When we were stopped the first time and were still on the train, people started to mob the bar so that while we were waiting, there was a good sized group of drunk people near us. I was not too thrilled with that even though Jason pointed out that at least they were happy drunks and it could have been a lot worse. I guess so but I still didn't want to be near them when the next train came to pick us up. Unfortunately, the first train that came was one that stopped at all the little stations along the way so we waited for the second one which would take us straight to London. We ended up getting home about an hour late at which point we collapsed into bed. It had been a very very busy day.