Of floors, stools, chairs, and (finally) a table

I've had more fun than I expected with photos of the sparsely furnished dining room on Facebook.  Enough fun that the dining room gets its own post to chronicle its evolution toward full functionality. Here's what it looked like when we saw the house in December.  It had two characteristics that we really like: lots of natural light, and tile floors.  There's this strange obsession with carpets in houses over here.  Now that we've been here a month during winter, I can sympathize because the carpets do a better job of buffering cold from your feet (although I do regret sending my slippers in the sea shipment).  That concession aside, we didn't think having some of our young children eat in a carpeted dining room was a good idea (ahem, Clare).  Access to natural light is valuable because of that whole thing regarding short days and lots of rain.

Kristine actually spent several lunches at the house with the younger girls before we officially moved in.  The sequence would be drop Elise off at school, then come up to the house.  They're the right size to be set up with a stool in the alcove.

The stool is going to be forever lodged in my head as where Charis sat while she taught herself to read.  A friendly family from St. Giles Church in Derby loaned us a set of books called the Read at Home collection, which go through increasing levels of difficulty with the same characters.  She still needs a little help with a couple of the higher level books, but she's got the rest down pat.

Elise hadn't eaten in the house until the weekend when we moved out of the apartment.  She got the plastic trunk.

Kristine and I got the floor.  That afternoon I drove into Chellaston to pick up the furniture we'd bought from the Freys when they returned to the US.  Steve gets some credit for putting the blog idea in my head, but the furniture (because between it and the air shipment we were able to move into the house without the sea shipment being here) and the time that he and Kuk graciously took out of their own busy reentry preparations to have lunch with us on our house-hunting trip are the gifts I'm really grateful for.

Thanks to some kind help from one of my colleagues here, we did get the table put together.

Which the girls were very happy about.  Although in this picture they're also happy to be eating Tesco shortbread.  It was the closest we got to celebrating Burns Night (that and listening to a couple performances of Address to a Haggis on YouTube).

What we did while tired and jetlagged

Our first day in the UK involved getting to our apartment, having everyone take a 2 hour nap, and picking up the rental car we drove until Rolls-Royce had our car ready from their fleet.  For those of you who (unlike me) appreciate cars, this is a BMW S318.  I didn't realize how deceptively large the trunk space was until we returned it and started driving our Golf.  I don't think this is a big car by UK standards, but it was definitely on the larger end of what Kristine and I felt comfortable driving on the roads here.

Jetlag meant a late start to the second day.  We had a bunch of errands to run in Derby City Center.  When we walked back to the parking garage to get the car at around 4 pm, this was the view of the sunset.  Not bad, especially considering we'd just barely escaped a snowstorm in the US, and the folks we'd met on landing were all apologizing for the rainy English weather.

Monday morning we dropped Elise off at school, and then took Charis and Clare out to the playground at Staunton Harold Reservoir.  They were thrilled to be able to run around and play.  The reservoir is only a few minutes from our house in Melbourne.  I expect we'll be there regularly.

Monday evening after picking Elise up, we did a grocery / uniform run at Sainsburys.  Kristine was focused on important things like figuring out how to read content in food packaging labels, and which food on the shelves looked close enough to what we eat in the US that we could get the girls to eat it. I on the other hand was busy enjoying the plurality of options for buying Marmite.

The trip over

If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken more photos of the snow in Indianapolis before we left.  We flew out on 2 Jan - right before Indianapolis got hammered with snow that would be respectable even in Connecticut, and cold temperatures that would be respectable even in Minnesota. Unlike the drive to the airport for our house-hunting trip, we did NOT get rear-ended on the highway.  Considering the amount of snow on the roads and the fact that we drove from West Lafayette, that's not a small miracle.

Kristine's parents saw us off at the airport.  They took this picture right before we went through security.  It doesn't do justice to the stellar packing job Kristine did.  A backpack each for her, Elise, and Charis, a shoulder pouch for Clare, mandolin and laptop for me, plus 3 more bags that rode on the stroller.  All this without overloading the girls so much that they toppled over (I found out after posting this picture on Facebook that we're not the only parents who think about these things).

Elise and Charis haven't been past airport security since 2008.  It was Clare's first time.  At the start of the trip in Indianapolis, all 3 were thrilled.

Clare was still cheerful when we got to Washington DC.  She was not cheerful when we boarded and sat at the gate for 2 hours waiting for the plane to be de-iced.  Fortunately, she and Kristine were in a row with just the two of them.  I had it much easier in the row behind them, mostly because Elise and Charis are both old enough to be at least somewhat entertained by the in-flight entertainment systems.

We did eventually take off, and made a safe (if more bumpy than I've had on a jumbo jet in many years) flight to Manchester.  Charis slept for a couple hours.  I think that explains her ability to smile.

Elise and I did not sleep. 

Welcome!

I'm joining the ranks of Rolls-Royce families from Indianapolis who write blogs while on secondment in the UK (thanks, Jay Seppanen and Steve Frey).