Hooray!

I feel like a new woman today.

Yesterday was rough.  Edith had a bad night so it was a VERY long day, with Martin at work from 9 am and a lot to do on not much sleep.  We made it through though, and I cleaned the house and prepared awesome Chinese food for dinner.  We even had Christine over since she's not been feeling well lately.  And, the best bit of yesterday, we bought a car.  It's not my first choice, but I'm sure I'll learn to love it.

I've been in a funk ever since the sale on that Seat fell through.  It's funny, because with NO car we were automatically £150 a month better off, but not having one makes me feel poor.  There I sat with loads of cash in my front room, knowing that I didn't have a £50 monthly insurance bill to pay and that I wouldn't have to shell out £80 a month on petrol, and I was all depressed about being broke.  This car is a Nissan Primera, and it's got a much smaller engine so should REALLY help with the fuel consumption.  And it will cost about £18 less per month to insure.  It's a nice car.  I'm trying to get excited about it.

That's not what the "Hooray" was for though.  It's all about that adorable little monster baby of mine.

She's been waking up two or three times a night for the past 6 weeks, feeding for about 5 minutes, then going back to sleep.  We decided to just let her fuss last night, and she slept through.  Well, she fussed for about 15 minutes at 1 this morning.  But she went back to sleep on her own, and then woke up at 5am--15 minutes before Dylan did.  She had a good feed, then went back to sleep.  That was 2 1/2 hours ago.

It feels so good to get a decent night's sleep!

Anyway, I need to get ready for the day.  We are going on a little drive with Christine to pick up our "new" car.  We have to go to Derbyshire.  That could be really fun, since we'll be in the peak district.  It could also be a really long day.  We'll see.  Derbyshire is lovely, and we're going somewhere I've never been.  That's kind of exciting.  I'll bring the camera in case there are any great photo ops.

Happy road tripping...

I hate it when I'm right...

The car that was "too good to be true" ended up being too good to be true.  Martin is on the train home from Sheffield as we speak.  So here we are with no car, and now nothing else is going to look as good.

C'est la vie.

Looks like something may be going right for once...

We decided a few weeks back that we couldn't afford the petrol, tax and insurance costs on our car any more, so decided to try and sell it and look for something a bit smaller.  We listed it on eBay in a 5 day auction, and sold it for the reserve price.  Success! 

We needed to find a new car, and fast, because of hospital appointments, Kleeneze, and Martin's delivery driver gig, so we started looking on eBay.  I found something that looked too good to be true, but we decided to call about it just to make sure.  And after an impromptu trip to Sheffield to check out this car, we are halfway to ownership of a 2005 Seat Leon.

Our eBay buyer is coming to collect the Rover tonight, and Martin will be taking the cash and catching a train to Sheffield tomorrow morning to pick up our new car.  Instead of being carless for a month, like last time, we will only be carless for about 18 hours.

And this car...

Martin and I love Seats.  They don't sell them in the U.S. but they are a subsidiary of Volkswagon.  VW test out their new stuff on Skodas, then Seats, then put them in Volkswagons, and then into Audis.  So it's a lovely little Spanish Volkswagon, pretty much.  Our first car when we moved here was a Seat Cordoba, and this is the updated version.  Seriously, if money had been no object, this is the car we would have chosen for ourselves.  Maybe not this color (it's BRIGHT yellow), but this car is seriously gorgeous!

We are getting the car for about 1/10 the actual value.  The insurance will be the same, but it will get about twice as many miles per gallon.  As Martin says, if the cost of running it doesn't end up being that much less, we can always sell the car for 5 times more than we bought it for!  We just have to scrape together a little bit of extra cash to tax the beast!

Pictures are coming!

Our afternoon at Donna Nook...

We arrived in the middle of the afternoon--at about 2:30.  The sun was dipping low on the horizon, but at least it was shining!  We strapped Edith into her sling, and off we went!

We had to climb over some sand dunes to get to the seal viewing area.  The climb was Dylan's favorite part!  Then we finally got to see the seals.

There were so many of them--some of them closer to the fence than others.  This one was close enough to touch, and was so lovely and fluffy and soft looking.

Dylan really liked the baby seals close to the fence.   He kept saying, "Oh, so cute!" and telling us that he wanted to kiss them (much to the amusement of all the other people there!).





Cathy took a picture of all 4 of us together-such a rare occurrance!

Dylan returned the favor by taking one of Cathy and John--with a little help from Martin, of course!

Then we got to see the baby seal (mentioned in an earlier post) that was just minutes old.  Amazing!  Kind of bloody and gross, but still amazing!  Edith and I stood and watched the mother seal try to get the baby to feed for the first time.  It was almost painful to watch, and I'll bet arms would have come in really handy at that point!

Then Dylan wanted to climb on the sand dunes, so Martin happily obliged with a rousing game of hide and seek in the bushes and running down the hills!

Edith and I just watched.  Having her strapped to the front of me is eerily like being 9+ months pregnant.  Can't see my feet, center of gravity really off, back aching, etc.

I captured a really good picture of the reason Edith gets called Cindy Lou Who...

She has the craziest hair on the planet.  But she's still a lovely little lady.  See...

A good time was had by all.  Wish you could have joined us!

The End

I love weekends!

Although I would like them more if Martin had two days off!

Yesterday was good. Martin wasn't feeling so hot when we woke up, so I took the kids to church by myself so he could get a little bit of rest. Hard work for me, but needed and appreciated by him. I managed to get the three of us ready and out the door by 9:20, proving to Martin that it really IS him who makes us late every week. I even stopped off in Scunny to pick up a crock pot that I got off Freecycle and we were STILL on time. Yay for me!

Church was ok, though I only stayed for Primary. It is actually impossible for me to handle both kids on my own during Sacrament meeting--especially now that Edith is bigger and either sits on the bench or on my lap the whole time. Dylan has a tendency to wander up on to the stand and try to talk into the microphone. And we left immediately after singing time, too. I was standing by the nursery and looked through the window to see Dylan pushing a little girl over and making her cry. I figured he needed to come out, and figured that would be as good a time to leave as any. Dylan cried because he didn't want to leave (he loves nursery and Emma)so I had to carry both kids and all my gear out to the car on my own. I love it when people at church see me struggling with my arms quite literally full of babies and other stuff and don't even try to open doors for me or offer to help.

Finished ranting now!

We had lunch when we got home, then hopped in the car for a little drive. We'd planned several weeks earlier to have a family outing to Donna Nook (the RAF bombing range) to see the baby seals. There's a large colony that uses the coast there as a breeding ground. Because of the bombing practice there, they have no predators. It's one of the safest places in England for seals to come ashore to have their pups.

It was a lot of fun! Cathy and her boyfriend John came, as did the mother and father-in-law. We got to see a seal that was just minutes old. I kind of wished I'd been able to watch it being born, and Martin was relieved that we'd missed it. There were so many tiny little fluffy white seals, though the seal placenta lying all over the sand dunes was pretty disgusting! We also got to watch the, erm, courtship of a couple of seals. That was interesting. It felt like we were watching a nature documentary, but it was much more visceral than telly!

After we saw the seals, we went back to Laurie and Christine's house and had dinner. It was delicious--especially since I didn't have to cook it! Then it was home to get the kids to bed. It was so late that we didn't even stay to help clean up and we skipped baths.

Edith was awake twice for feeds again. That girl is going to be the sleep-deprived death of me!

I have loads of pictures,, but the camera is in the kids' room and Edith has gone back to sleep. I don't want to chance waking her up just to put a few pictures on the blog. So I'll put this one on for now...

Dylan and I do our "very very bad" faces (from Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish--some are glad and some are sad, and some are very, very bad!).

...and will put some pictures from our weekend on the blog later.  Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, but soon.  I got a lovely sunset picture.  The sun is now setting at around 4 pm.  Only 5 move weeks until the shortest day of the year, thank goodness.  English winters are rough, when the sun rises at around 9 am and sets at about 4pm.  That is, of course, if the sun comes out at all.  Today is a gray and rainy day, so there will be no sunshine for us today!

Oh, Edith is awake.  Time to really start the day!

Dylan's funny little voice...

Edith's eyes...

We went to Ulceby yesterday and hung out at the in-laws' house so Martin could change the oil in our car (and it was DISGUSTING!). My father-in-law is currently on 10 days off at the refinery where he works, and my mother-in-law gets off work at about 1pm, so we had some good bonding time with both of them.

I, quite comically, took both kids and the dog for a walk at the same time. Dylan was riding in this little ride on car thing that I had to push, Edith was in the sling, and I had the dog on his lead until we got past the houses on their road. Must have been a sight to see, but it worked out ok. I was pretty tired by the time we got home though, with pushing Dylan, pulling on the dog's lead, and carrying Edith.

When we got back to their house, I was looking at Edith's eyes. They've been a deep sea green-blue color for quite a while now, and I thought she was too old for them to change. But yesterday, I saw a few flecks of brown in her eyes. I got all excited--I might have a cute little brown-eyed girl after all!

I remember when I was pregnant with Dylan getting all excited (and nervous) about how my baby would look. I thought it would be fun to see which features popped up in our children. And I was right--it IS fun to see who got what from which parent. And now it looks like we'll have a blonde haired, blue eyed male version of me and a brown eyed, dark haired female version of Martin. How cool is that?

We were looking at baby and toddler pictures of Martin yesterday, and I'll tell you what--Edith DOES look a lot like her daddy. I've always thought so, but looking at pictures yesterday totally confirmed it for me. The shape of their eyes, their mouths, their pointy little chins--it's all there. And Martin finally believes me. At least a little bit!

I hope you all enjoy the videos. I've been having trouble getting my videos loaded onto Blogger, so I finally just joined the masses and opened a YouTube account. It's so much easier that way, and now I can show videos of my beautiful children to my distant family. I have a cute one on my camera right now that I'll try to get posted soon. It's all about Dylan discovering that it's fun to make Edith laugh, not just to make her cry!

So other than the thing with Edith's eyes, not a lot going on right now. Martin is going to try to sell our car on E-bay so we can get one with a slightly smaller engine that will use less petrol and cost less to insure. I guess that's exciting, because we might not have transport for a few weeks.

Oh, I just thought of something exciting! We have decided to put our house up for auction. The property auction is in February and if it sells there it will take about 56 days (no more than that) for paperwork to be completed and the sale to be final. Then we will rent somewhere until we can get Martin's green card and get Edith's birth registered at the embassy and her U.S. passport sorted. Things are moving along again!

Edith is an early bloomer

Dylan does "yogo"