Playing aeroplane in an airplane: tick.

We bit the bullet, bought the tickets, took the six hour flight, and spent a week in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, sitting by a pool, scuba-diving, and eating, eating, eating.

“Five-month olds on a plane? On a six hour flight?  Are you insane?”

“Probably,” is my answer.

Five-month olds on a plane.

The flight there, where we had to check-in at 5am, was fine and the girls slept a lot (on the seat and on us), were a bit fussy, but did not cry, not really, not once.  “This is a piece of cake,” I thought to myself.  “There will be no problems on the way back.”

4am. Glasgow Airport. Revere the sling, for the sling brings silence and peace.

Check-in for the return flight was at 4pm.  “The girls will sleep,” I thought to myself, “and all will be fine. They were angels on the way here and there is no reason they will not be angels on the way back.”

Babies aren’t as predictable as all that.

Accomplished floor sleepers, the girls were having none of it on either flight -- hence the empty blanket beneath the chair.

There was no sleeping, and so there were a lot of tears.  There were four or five women who desperately wanted to help us out and play with the girls, but the girls have begun making strange and this includes increased decibel levels in the crying department, so no relief there.  Still, the flight did eventually end, and with only one smelly diaper during the flight…which I didn’t have to change (hurrah!).

And then there was the drive home to Aberdeen.

Newbie parents that we are, we naively believed that since we were arriving back in Glasgow at 8pm (an hour past the girls’ usual going to bed time), the girls would simply crash and sleep the three hour drive to Aberdeen, so no need to spend the night in a hotel.

I used the word naively in the previous paragraph, so you must know where this is going.  Little girls who haven’t slept on the flight aren’t necessarily going to sleep in their car seats even when the car is doing 80 mph and it is well past their bedtime. *sigh*   Much screaming led to a quick exit off the motorway onto a dark side-road, which led to much nursing and a few choice words between the parents.  Finally, said girls grudgingly crashed and didn’t wake until two minutes from our flat in Aberdeen.  Oh, and all of this was done in a snowstorm.  Needless to say, next time we’ll be renting that hotel room.

Would I do it again?  Yes.  Unfortunately, I’ll have two crawling eight-month olds to contend with on the next flight, so keep your eye out for that post.

 

Babies’ first bath. 13 January, 2011. Yep, more than a month after they were born.

So, I decided to wait until Mom arrived before giving the girls their first bath.  I figured that a) Mom, living so far away from them, would enjoy having that honour, and b) they never had a bath while in the neonatal unit so it probably wasn’t a big deal — right?  And, if I’m honest, I was a wee bit hesitant about the whole thing.  I mean,  I could have done it myself and I would have been fine, but why risk scalded and drowndeded* babies if you don’t have to?  Also, why not share the screaming?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In all honesty, the water was probably a bit on the cool side.  The second and third baths went much better with no screaming on Freya’s part and very little screaming by Daracha.  We’ll make water babies out of them yet!

*Yes, grammar police: I know it’s not a real word.  I’m using it anyway.

 

My Grandmother’s Dress

I don’t know the story behind this dress.  I just know that it was my Grandmother’s.  I don’t know when she made it.  I think she made it for herself sometime in the ’50s, or maybe the early ’60s.   What I do know is that I’ve been waiting for the proper occasion to wear it since she passed it on to me eight-or-so years ago.   And then, hallelujah and glory-be, our Christmas Ceroc evening was 1950s themed!  And the dress fit!!  (Yep,  I’m a Lawrence.)

I got to dance the night away in my Grandmother’s beautiful party dress.

Proper dancing, too.  With lots of twirling.

And I used a curling iron for the first time in about 10 years.  And bobby pins.  And hairspray.  But not 1950s, black-framed, cat-style glasses, sadly.  Just didn’t have those in my bag of tricks.  (Must make a note for myself to buy some for future forays.)

And what I loved about the whole thing the most?   Maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a daughter who will be wearing this dress at a party one day, and she can put pictures of her in the dress with the pictures of me, and the pictures of my grandmother.

[Note to relatives back home:  ask Grandma to dig pictures out, will you, please?]

 

And on the Sixth Day…

Umm…well…the sixth month…

Do you see it?

No?  Let me give you a closer look.

The chickens gave us EGGS!

Well, okay, it was one chicken and one egg.   We’re expecting another one tomorrow, though.  We know this because a second legbar is acting like the first one was today:  wandering around on its own, checking out small enclosed spaces.

“What’s that you said, Crystal?  A legbar laid today’s egg?”

“Why, yes.  It did.”

“So that means YOUR EGG IS BLUE!!”

And I answer, “YES IT IS!!!” (with three exclamation marks and one happy dance)

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?  Notice the upside down heart?

And here’s the egg all cleaned up and in some lower lighting so you really see the blue.  (I was going to hold it next to a white egg for contrast, but it seems we only have brown eggs in the house.)

“Wait.  What’s the material behind you, Crystal?  I don’t remember having seen it before.”

That’s because you haven’t seen it before, friends and family.  It’s new, having been purchased just yesterday as a heat-retaining strategy.

As you know, we keep looking for ways to keep the heat in our tin can house.  I’ve stapled fiberglass under our living room and bedroom, I’ve put old haybales under the caravan as a wind-break and to retain heat (…please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice…), I’ve had my dad buy and post shrink-wrap plastic for windows from Canada, since stores are no longer allowed to sell it over here in the UK.  [Note:  if any UK people know for a fact that I'm wrong about this, then please, please send me the name of the store that sells it, so that I no longer have to import the stuff.]  Today’s curtain is the final step and will help keep the heat in the kitchen and living room, rather than having it dissipate in the hall.  It took me four hours of hand-sewing and I now have a hole in my middle finger where the needle kept digging in, but it was so worth it.

 

Blueprints. (sort of)

Graeme and I received the first drawings of the house from our architect on Tuesday.  There are some aspects we are very pleased with, others we’re not so keen on, a few where we are reserving judgement for a few days, and a couple aspects we can’t see ourselves living with.

It’s all very exciting.

Next step is to make an appointment with Nicole to talk everything over.  Yay!

 

La La La La La La La

No. I am not sitting here with my fingers in my ears, trying to drown out the sound of the boring football game (that’s soccer for all my N.A. friends and family) by la-la-la-ing. Although, I’ve plenty of practice and could if I wanted to.

Okay. To be fair, I have been told on good authority that it’s a very exciting football game: Liverpool vs. Chelsea, and Liverpool need to score three goals before the game is over in order to get to the semi-finals, or something like that. Even I know that this is almost impossible, but everyone keeps saying Liverpool is the team to do it if it is going to be done. There’s been a lot of cheering and singing and aw!-ing and oh!-ing going on, and the presenters are very intense, so the game (which is very boring because it’s football, but not as boring as cricket or tennis or golf) must be living up to expectations.

But now back to me.

This la-la-la-ing is my way of saying that I’ve joined the Cluny Church choir. Nope, I haven’t reverted back to religion (sorry Mom and Dad), nor will I be going to church on Sundays, as the choir only practices for special occaisions. And I do feel a teensy bit guilty singing songs of praise about an omnipotent being I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in, but where else is a girl going to get some singing in without having to remain in town and wait for five hours on a Wednesday until the folk crowd show up at the Blue Lamp? Cluny church is just around the corner and I get to meet some more people in my community.

What I was not expecting from a church hall I’ve been in only once before and from the people, of whom I’d only met one before, was Familiarity. The setting was different, but Sandy was just as enthusiastic as Sally about his piano playing (albeit with fewer flourishes and less bounce), half of the songs are ones I grew up singing, and the tunes of another quarter were familiar even if the words weren’t. But most of all, the sense of familiarity came from the fact that church choir practice is church choir practice: everyday folk from a small community who go to a small Presbyterian church with a small congregation, and who have known one-another for years, singing both for the fun of it and because it’s what you do. I felt I was back home in the basement of Zion United. And being back home is a very good feeling to have when home is what you miss the most.

 

To Market, To Market…

Some pictures to give you a flavour of Thainstone Market on a non-animal auction day. (Not so) strangely, much of the auction grounds smelled of dairy: disinfectant and farm animal. Tune in after the first Saturday of May and you’ll see my take on the Rare Breeds sale. In the mean-time check out Brian D’s Scottish Country Blog for his commentary (and pictures) from last year’s Rare Breeds sale.

 

News Flash

This just in:

A red squirrel has been spotted on the property of Graeme and Crystal Anderson, Dalherrick Road, Sauchen, not half-an-hour ago. This native species of the British Isles has been slowly displaced by the grey squirrel, introduced from North America in the late 1800s. The pox virus carried by the grey squirrels specific to Wales, England and Ireland have decimated the red squirrel population in those countries. Scotland is now a stronghold with 75% of the British red squirrel population, but for how much longer we’re not sure as grey squirrels still outnumber the red in Scotland by 20 to 1.

Currently, the decline in the Scottish red squirrel population is linked to food rather than the pox virus and so is not as pronounced as in Wales, England and Ireland. However, grey squirrels carrying the virus were found near the Scottish border in 2005. Past history has shown that outbreaks of the virus in red squirrels usually take no longer than three years from its introduction. True to form, in 2007, Lockerbie was the site of the first confirmed cases of red squirrels killed by the disease in Scotland.

Aberdeenshire, where Graeme and Crystal are located, has one of the larger populations of grey squirrels in Scotland. It is reassuring to note, however, that environmental assocations and wildlife trusts have taken the threat of the grey seriously and have just this year introduced a cull that targets the entire grey squirrel population in the area.

If you are interested in reading further about the Aberdeen initiative, please see the Press & Journal article of 10/02/2009. If you would like to learn more about the red squirrel and its plight, please refer to the Scottish Squirrel Survey site, from which the majority of the above information and the photograph were taken.

 

Another First

Last Saturday, I went to my first Burns supper. It was held in the small and lovely Midmar Hall (don’t judge a book by its cover) and drew people not only from Midmar, but also the surrounding areas. In order to give you an idea of the size of the community, if the croft were the farm, then Midmar would be Sowerby — but on a backroad.

What is a Burns supper, I hear you ask? It’s a dinner to celebrate the genious that was Robert Burns, complete with whisky, haggis, pipes, poetry and song — not at all in that order. And since Rabbie was quite the ladies’ man (13 children by five different women), there’s even a toast to the lassies (a wee bit tongue-in-cheek, I found). And after the entertainment, the meal always begins with the Selkirk Grace. A grace that we can all take a lesson from: true thankfulness for what you have stemming from an awareness of just how damn lucky you are to have it.

Some hae meat and cannot eat.
Some cannot eat that want it:
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.