First snowfall

We woke up to snow this morning - yay! Fortunately it was a Forest School day so Tryfan and I got to spend the morning outside playing in it in the forest nearby. Poor Rhiannon had to get dressed into her school uniform and go to school same as normal :-( But she did play outside with Tryfan when she came home this afternoon. Here are some of the kids in the FS group heading out into the forest.
Our lovely village hall church that we start our day from (well, not the church part - we start in the hall part).
What a good way to end the month! T and R are excited to open their advent calendars tomorrow morning as December starts up...

Road trip to north London

Today we drove 1.5 hours to get to the north side of London and then we spent the afternoon with our friends Neel, Resh, Zara and Kian. There were another couple of families there too - another Leeds Uni reunion! - and it was a really great afternoon. The kids were pretty good in the car - Tryfan looked out the window and talked to himself while Rhiannon colored her Norwegian 'mandala' book.
It turns out that Kian and Tryfan have very similar interests: Firemen, Buzz Lightyear, and sweets. Fortunately Kian was good about sharing his Buzz Lightyear toy with Tryfan because once big T had his hands on it, they didn't come off until it was time to say goodbye. Literally. He played by himself with Buzz the entire time we were there, taking a break only to eat lunch. And as you can see in the photo below, he was even wearing his beloved Buzz Lightyear t-shirt which is 2 sizes too big for him (and yet he insists on wearing it most days).
Meanwhile Rhiannon and Zara tormented one of the other guests, Richie, by climbing on him and putting sparkly headbands on him.
So it was a lovely way to spend the Sunday, even if it was a big drive. Good friends are worth the effort though :-)

Thanksgiving in my heart

I love Thanksgiving, and yet today we did absolutely nothing to celebrate or recognize it except for talk to my family on skype video. It was a normal Thursday with lots to do and then we had burgers and chips (fries) for dinner. But I was thinking all day about my friends and family throughout the USA and wishing them all a heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving.

Crazy Sand

Saturday was the school Christmas Fair from 1-3pm, and somehow I got roped into working at the Crazy Sand craft table. The deal was that if you paid 2 pounds, you could choose a Christmas-themed clear plastic container and then fill it with different colored sands. My job was to take the money and help people make sure that their containers were full to the top after settling a bit, then putting a cap on the container. And of course I had two very keen little helpers by my side!
It was actually a pretty fun afternoon - somehow these events are more fun when you are 'on the inside' working at the event rather than just merely attending. Our Crazy Sand table was right next to the Tree Ornament craft table, so R & T each made an ornament with lots of glitter and glue.
I was supposed to just work an hour at the stand, but my replacement never showed up so we were there until 3pm. However, I drew the line there and we didn't stick around for the raffle drawing. Two hours is enough of this scene!

Birthday weekend

I turned another year older on Friday and decided to do something a bit different to celebrate, so I took the train into London and spent the evening with my cousin Annie!
The rugby was on telly this evening so I knew right where Rhodri wanted to be, and it wasn't out anywhere celebrating my birthday! I also knew that I would feel too restless if I stayed in so I was very happy that Annie didn't have any other plans for this evening and could spend it hanging around with me. We had a great time, needless to say!

On Saturday night, Rhodri had arranged a babysitter to look after the kids so that we could go out to dinner without them. Yay! This same babysitter also baked a birthday cake for me, so that was definitely a Double-Yay! All in all a very happy birthday for me :-)

A manly milestone

Tryfan has been really into performing 'tricks' lately. These are not tricks really - probably better classified as 'stunts' because they always involve some kind of running and/or jumping and/or being upside-down in some way. Here he is mid-trick... the rest of the trick involves keeping his head and hands in the same place but moving his feet together from one arm rest to the other. Don't know where he learns these tricks, but he seems to be pretty good at them!
Anyway, that is not the manly milestone I refer to in the title! Tryfan's manly milestone, which he started for the first time about 10 days ago but is now totally proficient at, is standing up to go pee. Oh yeah. He's good at it too. And he gets to practice both indoors and outdoors, so he is quite versatile in terms of clothing requirements. Way to go, Tryfs!

Rest of the weekend

On Saturday, the kids and I took Bentley to the forest across the road from us. It was a mild and muddy day - perfect for kids and dogs to play in!
We found a tree that was perfect for Rhiannon to climb. The thing about climbing trees is that one only really gets competent at doing it when one is able to do it completely by themself starting from the ground. So this particular tree (shown in a photo further down the page) had handholds in just the right places for Rhiannon to be able to reach and pull herself up, then put one foot in there and reach with her other hand to this handhold. Tryfan, of course, was very jealous and he wanted to do it too! Big tears and a bit of a tantrum, and so then I convinced the two of them to go explore this big tree that had fallen.
We found that the root section was perfect for Tryfs to climb on, and then he could climb onto the main trunk of the tree and crawl to the other end, then slide down one of the branches (like a fireman would slide down a pole, of course) and run back to the other side to start again.
Here is Rhiannon way up in the tree that was perfect for her to climb in, with Tryfan stomping around on the ground below repeatedly asking me to help him get up to one of the branches and me refusing. All this time, Bentley was happily racing around the heathland being free and joyous!
Eventually we came back to the house and everyone got hosed down before we went inside. Here is Bentley in the drying room.
Another thing that happened this weekend was that I tucked into the enormous pumpkin that we grew in our back garden this summer! Since we were in Wales for the week prior to Halloween, we never did get a chance to turn this guy into a jack-o-lantern, so this was his big chance to become something great. I cut him into pieces and roasted til tender, then pureed, measured and filled up the freezer with pumpkin puree.
I have big plans to make a large quantity of pumpkin butter in addition to making all the other yummy things one can make with pumpkin, but we shall see what actually happens...

Bentley is back!!

Bentley has been living with our dear neighbors in Norway ever since the last week of April, and they have grown quite fond of him over the past 6 months. He has had such a good life with them in the care of three girls who loved brushing him and two active parents who were always taking him on runs and bike rides and up to their hytte in the mountains! I think it was a sad day on Monday this week when the lady from Transpet came to pick him up from their house. But we have vowed to keep in touch and hopefully they will come visit us (well, probably mostly Bentley) this summer. We are so, so grateful to Heidi and TK and their girls for loving him and looking after him while we waited for the rabies quarantine period to run its course so that he could come live in the UK.

It sounds like the road trip from Asker, Norway to mid-Sussex, England was quite an adventure! We saw a big motor home with "The Pet Transporter" written across it pull up in the pitch black rainy night last night and then Bentley came bounding in accompanied by the Transpet lady called Jane and all of his belongings and paperwork.
Here is our long-awaited reunion:


We invited Jane in for a cup of tea and some pizza dinner and she told us about the journey... driving in the first snowfall of the year while in Norway, then over to Stockholm in Sweden to pick up 2 more dogs and 4 cats for another family, then making her way solo driving this motorhome across Europe to cross the English Channel in Calais, France.
At this point when she was getting ready to board the ferry to cross into the UK, the UK Immigration wouldn't let Bentley in because his passport was not from the EU! So Jane turned around and fortunately found a vet in the town who could transfer all of Bentley's information to a new, French, passport! Then Jane and her motorhome full of animals had to race to catch the last ferry of the day. I'm so glad that I didn't know about any of this drama as it was unfolding...
I think Bentley must be one of the few dogs in the world to have 2 different passports! Here he is saying goodbye to Jane:
We spent the evening letting him get used to us again. I think he was quite tired emotionally after being sad to leave his foster family, then enjoying the company and comfort of Jane and his fellow travelers, then arriving back to us but in a place that has all new smells. Bentley's eyes look sad this morning but we are taking him out to the forest for a walk now, so hopefully that will cheer him up.

En route to us...

Finally, finally, our wonderdog Bentley is on his way back to us!
He left his foster family on Monday morning and has been riding shotgun in some kind of motorhome which is being driven from Scandinavia to the UK by a lady who runs a pet transport business. We didn't want to have him ride on an airplane again and we really didn't have time or energy to drive over and get him ourselves, so we hired this lady to have Bentley join her roadtrip. It sounds like quite a chaotic scene - 3 dogs and 4 cats altogether in a motorhome - but whatever! We got word today that he should be here around midday tomorrow!!!
Its going to be so strange and difficult and wonderful to have him here! Fingers crossed that all of his paperwork is in order for when he enters the UK...

Standing up on the job

Tryfan has reached a new milestone: he has learned how to pee standing up!
He now just goes by himself without any help or supervision and then when he is done, he races back to where the rest of us are and announces his success with great excitement. I guess he did it for the first time last week but now he is really a pro. Sorry, no photo to accompany this milestone :-(

In other news, its been a rainy and windy week -- feels very much like the way mid-November in Britain should be. So that's encouraging. We've been busy with the normal work and school/ nursery routine and its all going more or less fine.

Michel for the weekend

Our friend Michel came to stay the weekend with us from Norway. As I've said before, each one of us has our own connection with this young French bachelor (nothing dodgey though!), but Rhiannon has a particularly soft spot for him. He arrived Saturday morning and we immediately went for a long walk in the forest.
There are beautiful leaves around just now, and Rhiannon wanted to make a bouquet for the wedding she was planning to have later. We eventually extracted from her that she was planning to marry Michel. Big surprise there!
Rhiannon insisted on taking this photo of us but made me hold her fishing pole (which she had intended to somehow rig to hold the camera but couldn't quite figure out how to implement).
Our picnic site in the forest. We were actually on sort of a peninsula between two lovely ponds.
One of the ponds with a flash of sunlight illuminating the autumn colors in the trees.
Tryfan riding on Michel's head as we went for another walk to another part of the forest on Sunday morning!
Tryfan and I showed Rhodri, Michel and Rhiannon where we have been spending all our Forest School sessions. This is one of the trees that is especially good for climbing (though not normally as high as Rhiannon is here)...
We went to a pub nearby (not the same one we went with Rob and Dhara) and had a lovely Sunday lunch before the kids had to go to a birthday party. Eventually, though, we all had to say goodbye to our friend as he headed back to Norge.
Thanks for coming to visit us, Michel :-)

Writing off the day

My friend Rob stopped in to visit us today and we spent part of the afternoon at the pub down the road. So great! Tuesdays I don't have any childcare for Tryfan in the afternoons and I am with him in the forest in the mornings, so most of the day is a write-off for me anyway in terms of work. What better way to write it off than to reunite with an old friend and his daughter? (photo courtesy of Rob)
We had a hearty pub lunch while sitting in the playground part of the beer garden. Dhara and Tryfan both got to have chocolate ice cream after their sausage and chips meal!

We picked up Rhiannon from school and played at home, then had dinner altogether when Rhodri got home from work. The 3 of them were like peas in a pod - very fast friends! Here they are before everyone started melting down before bedtime.
Thanks for making time for us, Rob and Dhara!