Yogurt Heaven

Since coming to England, I have bought a ridiculous amount of yogurt. It's probably because I buy this:

Nutritional Value: slim to none. Taste Value: through the roof. 
And don't worry, they come in a variety of flavours, including vanilla yogurt + milk chocolate crunch biscuit things, and banana yogurt + chocolate covered flakes.

England = yogurt heaven.

Lists on Elizabeth

Things I want Elizabeth to be able to do now:

• feed herself and actually get food in her mouth
• use words like, "Mum, I really really don't like this food, please stop shoving it in my mouth" instead of just clamping her gums together
• find her soother all on her own when she wakes up in the night
• know how tall she is and stop standing up underneath coffee tables and hitting her head

Things I wish Elizabeth still did:

• sit in the same place when I left the room
• only breastfed - it was so much easier to leave the house, no packing of food, and spoons, and bib, and cloth, and, and, and, and, and...
• slept in our arms
• lay down in the bath - it was super cute to see her splash with four limbs - but now she sits up and plays with toys instead of just splashing

  Things I want Elizabeth to do forever:

• crawl/walk to the door and be super excited when Matthew comes home from work
• babble-sing to herself
• put her head on my shoulder when we hug
• play dress up with the piles of laundry or the mitts & toques by the front door

•  do "cheers" with her sippy cup (or regular cup when we get there)

Things that make me excited for Elizabeth to be a teenager one day:

• teaching her to make us coffee in the morning, and then having it on her list of daily chores

One More Step Towards Britishdom: Laundry.

We don't have a washing machine - in the space where we could put a washing machine, we have a freezer instead. It was a good call - you do laundry maybe once a week, whereas you eat everyday. Plus we have a little laundromat for our complex, and since I can be home during the day, I can zip over and get ours done without waiting in line. And sometimes I can get both loads done at once, which makes me feel like I'm saving time, therefore winning at life.

We have a little drying aerial thing in our back yard, but every time I do laundry, it is grey and cold, and not ideal for drying. I tried once, and the laundry hung from about 10 am to 6 pm, and was still totally soaked. So I just use the dryers in the laundromat, which is expensive and annoying. Expensive because it is 20p for 8 minutes (about 40cents for 8 minutes), so it's 1.40£ for about an hour. Annoying because I have to keep a huge stash of 20p coins, because most loads take about an hour to dry. But yesterday, the sun was shining and lovely in the morning, so of course my first thought was, "go to the laundromat!!!". I felt super British with my towels and clothes blowing around and drying. So energy efficient am I.

But the weirdest thing is: we have missing socks since we've been here - 11 weeks, and already seven missing socks. Where do those buggers go??

Our First Cambridge Rowing Experience

On Saturday we went down to the banks of the river Cam to watch the Lent Bumps races. It was a most excellent day - we went with Javiera & her son, Manuel, and Ignacia & her husband Francisco & their 3 kids. Then some more Chilean folks joined us, and we all had a picnic outside this pub called The Plough, and watched some rowing. Even though it wasn't warm outside, everyone had a great time. We spent the whole afternoon outside on a grey, drizzly day, and it was awesome. Who doesn't love grey skies, rowing & beer?

What are the Bumps, you might ask - well, if you want an 'actual' explanation for them: http://www.firstandthird.org/tables/rowing/bumpworkings.shtml. But here is the quick & dirty version: The races happen over 5 days in March. Instead of lining up in a horizontal row, the boats from the Colleges line up vertically along the river. The goal is to actually hit the boat in front of you. If that happens, the two boats involved (Bumper and Bumpee) both pull over to the side of the river - the race is over for them. But on the next days' race, the Bumper goes ahead of the Bumpee. Sometimes boats will 'overbump' - this is a bit tricky to explain. Imagine boat #3 bumps boat #2 - they both pull over. Then imagine boat #4 rows like crazy, and catches up to boat #1 and bumps them - that is called overbumping. There is a possibility of double-over-bumping, but I guess it's pretty rare. There are 4 mens divisions and 3 womens, and a new race starts every 40 minutes. To signal 4 minutes & 1 minute to a race starting, they fire off a cannon. Seriously. I love England.

See how the Pink & White Stripeys are trying to avoid the boat coming up?

They got bumped anyways by these White Stripeys. Poor Pink & White Stripeys. I went crazy with cheering & excitement. I'm sure you can imagine.

 But the best part is that after everyone is done the race - either by going the distance or by bumping/being bumped - they have the row-of-champions and the row-of-losers. The Bumpees all row down to the end of the river, and get the polite British clap, and then the Bumpers come along. Once the Bumper boats have pulled over to the side of the river, their fans cut off leafy branches of trees, and they put them in their hair or around their necks, and the cox holds up the College's flag for their victory row. I totally wanted to put leaves in my hair - it was hard to resist.

See how the Cox has leaves in her hair? Matthew took these photos on his camera, so they're high resolution (or something) and therefore I can't enlarge them because then they go all pixel-ated. Sorry.

It's hard to tell, but a few of these girls have leaves in their hair. Honest.

Each college has specific colours,

and you'd think that by the end of the day I would have learned which colours are for which College, but no. I did, however, resist cheering for Gryffindor when Selwyn rowed past:

 
A couple of guys from Matthew's lab were rowing, so we had someone to cheer for. But let's get serious: I cheered like crazy anytime any boat got even close to bumping. We saw two bumps and on the first one I almost fell in the river while cheering. 

I have to include one last picture of The Most British Man In England. He had a tweed coat with elbow patches, a satchel, a cap, wellies, a massive hearing aid, bad teeth, and a one-legged stool thing - it had a spike on the end to drive it into the ground, and then he had a little seat. I am so sad this is the only shot we have of him:

Book Clubs, Old Ladies and Infidelity

When we first moved into our University housing, there was a brochure for the Newcomers & Visiting Scholars Society on the dining room table. They have regular 'coffee mornings' on Tuesdays, where newcomers can come and meet other newbies, as well as meet the members of the Society. It is really easy to figure out who is a newcomer and who is a member of the Society. About 80% of the newcomers are Asian, and about 95% of the members of the Society are old ladies.

These coffee mornings are funny for two reasons: (1) They serve tea, and (2)There are always presentations, and when the newcomers are trying to meet each other and have introductory conversations, the old ladies are always shushing us. I'm sure these presentations are very interesting, and would probably add to my 'Cambridge experience', but let's face it: when you have a baby who is trying to walk all the time, and if not walk, then crawl all over everything, including other kids, you just aren't paying attention to any presentations. Especially not about the history of architecture in Cambridge, or how to fold a Chinese Lantern for Chinese New Year.

But I digress: on my first week there, I signed up for a whole bunch of things, because I had no friends and no life. I signed up for the tour of some church or another, and the kids' Mardi Gras party, and the Scottish dancing night. I also signed up for the book club. I am a member of an awesome book club in Edmonton, that my sisters & I started for my Mum. Half the members are my Mum's friends, and the other half are their daughters. It is an interesting group, and we always have a really good time - even if only half of us (sometimes less) finish the book.

Now the first rule of my Edmonton Book Club is: you don't talk about Book Club. The second rule of my Edmonton Book Club is: you don't talk about Book Club.  The first rule of my Cambridge Newcomers Book Club is: You don't quote Brad Pitt movies. And none of them would have understood that joke at all.

  There were 7 women there - 5 of them were 'locals', one of them was a lovely woman from Pakistan who hadn't finished the book, and me. I was the youngest one there by about . . . 25 years. Minimum. The book we read was 'Ghostwalk' by a Cambridge author, Rebecca Stott. It is set in present day, and is about a woman researching Isaac Newton & alchemy, who dies right at the end of writing her book on it - or was she murdered by some group trying to save Newton's reputation? Good premise, right? Until all of a sudden (spoiler alert) it becomes more about animal activists, and the woman's son (aka neuroscientist who experiments on rats) being the mastermind of a double-agent-style activist group, who arranged his Mother's death. Oh, and a lot of paranormal, seance-type stuff was thrown in too. I don't recommend it.

The discussion was mainly on the book, with a very few sidebar conversations. And only a couple 'shushes' from one woman when two conversations were happening at once. I only really contributed a couple comments, and both of them were discussed at length:
(1) One of the characters has repeated affairs with the same woman, and his wife knows about them. I said that the wife was a terribly weak character, and that she should not have stayed with her husband after the first affair. One of the women actually said, "Well, Georgina, you are terribly young, and you may not realize that this happens more than you think. There are lots of reasons women stay in marriages and know full well their husbands are having an affair."  I should have responded, "I may only be 29, but I know that infidelity is not a sign of a healthy marriage, and in this day & age, there are no reasons to stay in a dysfunctional marriage. Not to mention that the character has children, and she is setting a terrible example of what marriage is." And maybe something like, "PS Just because affairs happen all the time doesn't make them okay, crazy old lady." But instead I said something like, "I still find her a weak character for not leaving him." And then for the rest of book club I thought about this lady's life, and what kind of marriage she has... awwwwwkwarrrrd.
(2) The narrator of the story said something like, "Life is disappointing, when you looked close; full of mediocrity and domesticity." So I commented that I found that sentiment rather off putting, since my life has become incredibly domestic since moving to Cambridge, and I didn't find it mediocre at all. I explained that, had we stayed in Canada, I would be getting ready to go back to work, and moving away from the stay-at-home Mum gig, whereas here in Cambridge, I have no plans to work in the foreseeable future. And one of them said, "Well, my dear, you're the wife of an Academic now!" - whatever that means? Then they started defending the Stay At Home Mums, and talking about how important it is for the future of the country, etc etc - it helps if you re-read that sentence with an old-lady-British-accent. And it was kind of like they were arguing, but they were all on the same side... And a few of them did that quintessential Old-British-Lady thing where they close their eyes while talking & making their point. (Do you know what I'm talking about??)

So next month, instead of a book, we are all to bring in a piece of poetry from our own country - I'm really stoked for five examples of British poetry - and read them aloud for the group.

Seriously??

So the question is: do I go back for more Crazy Old Ladies? And if I do, can anyone name a Canadian poet??

The Hobnob Challenge

Matthew has a sweet tooth. There is no denying it. I, on the other hand, do not. In Canada, I rarely bought cookies because inevitably, I would eat two or three out of the whole box, and Matthew would eat the rest, in about a week. He has this condition where he will eat whatever is in front of him - no matter what it is. If you have a box of Ritz crackers, he'll eat them. If it's a box of cookies, he'll eat them. This works with everything though, so if you put a bag of carrots in front of him, he'll eat them too.

There is one kind of cookie that I really like though - but because it is British, it's not a cookie, it's a biscuit. They are called Hobnobs and they are these crunchy, oat-y biscuits of deliciousness. One of my favourite things about them is they come in a tube, not a box. For some reason, this speaks to me.

On my first grocery shop (remember, the 4 carts, trolleys?) I bought a tube of cookies. I had two with tea that night - we were playing 'British'. Matthew polished off the rest of the tube (about 20 cookies) by the end of that week. With my first online grocery shop, I accidentally bought 3 tubes (whoopsies). I had originally clicked to add one tube to my basket, but then saw that they came in a double pack for cheaper. So I clicked that into my basket too, and forgot to delete the single tube.  It's a good thing I'm getting better at the online shopping, because Matthew ate all three tubes of cookies - except for probably 6 - in about 10 days. :) Love him! When I brought this up, he got a bit bashful, and decided he would not binge on Hobnobs ever again.

Here's the thing. I have invited some girls over next Monday for tea after our playgroup (yeah, I said tea - when I said coffee, all 3 of them said, 'we don't drink coffee', so I had to say, 'oh, I meant tea!!' even though I really meant coffee...), so I had to buy some cookies to give them. To those of you who might bake cookies for when you have guests, I have to tell you I'm a terrible baker. Matthew won't even eat the cookies I make. :( So I bought some more cookies - a 3 pack this time because I thought they were 3 different kinds of Hobnobs. Turns out, I need to learn to read a bit better because the packaging clearly indicates they are, in fact, just 3 different kinds of biscuits. 

So, Matthew has enrolled himself in the Hobnob Challenge: Can he make it to Monday without eating all three tubes of cookies? Only time will tell...

Experimental Video

I just figured out how to use the video recorder on my Blackberry. We have been here 6 weeks and I only just realized my phone had a video camera. Awesome.

Here is my first video of Elizabeth. We were having lunch, and this is a very typical lunchtime conversation. Her smile at the end is kind of to die for. Enjoy.