The Big News

The Big News of the moment is: we're finally trying to toilet train J. Yes, yes, this is long overdue. It's only been one day so far. And it's been tough! So please pray for patience and endurance for us, and for J to learn quickly!

After making quite a few calls to a number of preschools, we finally managed to find a place for J at the Claremont United Methodist Nursery School. We paid them a visit - it was nice! Each classroom opens out to its own play area, the kids have a really fun room, they do lots of art and can get quite dirty. Looks like fun. BUT J has to be toilet trained first! Hence why I finally got started on this. He's registered for the fall term, so we have three months! Oh, and I have to put in 16 days of parent participation, which basically means I have to help out in the classes. Not sure if that's going to be so fun for me (15 kids like J! In the same room!), but we'll see...

On to other stuff. It's a lot less convenient, and more expensive, to eat out here, so I've been cooking at home a lot more than I used to. No coffee shops downstairs, no market five minutes away. I've had to be a bit more inventive - don't want to be making the same stuff over and over again.

I found this in the Asian supermarket here, and bought it on a whim: Seasoned dried bonito and sesame seed mix. It's turned out to be really yummy! I sprinkled some on green beans that had been dressed with some sesame oil and soya sauce. Yum. Also really good sprinkled over egg salad. J liked it. He kept asking for the parts with bonito flakes.

The kids have been snacking a lot here than they did back home too. Maybe the cooler temperatures increase their metabolic rate! So I've had to thinking really hard about what to give them. E will eat almost all kinds of fruit, so there's that. She's had cherries, strawberries, oranges, bananas, nectarines, pluots. And she'll eat raisins like there's no tomorrow. But J refuses everything. He'll only eat apples and watermelons. Anything with chocolate in it, they both love. But I'm trying to limit that. So I found a ready mix for banana bread at Trader Joe's (my favourite supermarket here, but not the cheapest), so ta-dah. They turned out pretty well, and the kids ate them, although J avoided the piece of fresh banana I put in the middle like it was poison.

Saved the best for last: In-N-Out Burgers! So so good. J can finish a whole hamburger by himself (albeit sans tomato). And that was for a teatime snack too. He was having a hungry day. And K, who usually hates fries, loves these. He bought back for dinner yesterday and came into the house saying that if the drive back had been any longer, there wouldn't have been any fries left. And we all fought over the vanilla milkshake.