Everyday Life March 2010

There hasn't been anything too exciting going on here.  Just the normal everyday life. And what does that mean you may ask? Well here is my typical day:

Wake up around 6:30am. My body is finally back to that. I'm a morning person. I like to be up in the morning and crash at night. I checkout my emails, blogs and read the news. Kherington and Ryan wake up around 7. We read together (well, Kherington climbs from one person to the next...whoever is holding the book). I feed Kherington breakfast, clean her up and we play. She goes down from morning nap around 9am. I do my Slim in 6 workout video while watching a TV episode (it makes the workout go by so much faster...right now I am working my way through the West Wing series). Some days she doesn't feel like napping, but I get at least 30 minutes to myself to get through the cardio part of the workout. If I hear her, I check on her at the transition and if she's up she comes and joins me for the last 30 minutes. Kherington has a snack and we play some more. By then, I have finally cooled off enough to shower. Kherington's new enjoyment while I shower is finding anything on the ground, picking it up and putting it in the tub with me...clothes, towels, shoes, books...yeah, fun times. Then we have an early lunch and plan what to do the rest of the day. Usually that means figure out if we need to stop by the store for any grocery items and decide where we want to walk.

This last week I found a really cool park that's about a mile away. There were donkey's pulling a trash cart, ducks, swans, bird houses, and interesting playground/workout type things. The second time we tried to go it was closed for some unknown reason, but we went again yesterday and took some pictures. The weather was nice except for a 5 minute hail storm.

It's usually about 2pm when we get back from our walk. We play some more, walk over to the store if need be, go to the playground (right behind our apartment), etc. Kherington goes down for her afternoon nap by 3:30pm.  If it's a good day she's sleep for 2 hours.  If it's not, she'll talk to her rainbow bear for 30 minutes, I'll go get her and we play some more.

I look at a lot of recipe blogs to try and decide what to make for dinners.  Here's the criteria: a) does it look good, b) does it sound good, c) can I find the ingredients here (that 's usually the kicker), d) how expensive will those ingredient's actually be.  I like to cook. In the U.S. where our fridge was actually cold that was okay. Here, not so much. Leftovers keep for a day, if that. Our freezer does work great, but lacks space for the most part.  I like to bake even more that cook, but ya know, we really don't need to eat sweets all day everyday (sad, but true) and we don't know many people here to take our treats to (even more sad, but still true). So, cooking/baking has been cut back a little, but I still love to checkout the recipes.  Oh and side note, the BEST soup I have ever made is found on the sisterscafe.blogspot.com. It is called Heartly Healthy Chicken Quinoa Stew. I love it. I think I could live off it. I tried freezing what we didn't eat and it reheated great. I just had to add some extra water.

Well, back to our everyday life. I make dinner (assuming there isn't leftovers that must be eaten), feed Khertington and put her in the tub for bath. She still loves her baths. Not so much splashing, but talking to her bath animals and reading her bath book that Auntie Michelle gave her. Ryan get's home around dinner or bath time. We put some PJ's on her, daddy chases her around for awhile and it's bottle and bed time at 8pm.

Yep, so that's the standard everyday life here. There's always the exciting 'going to the chocolate outlet day' or 'heading to the market day', but in general this is what we do. I really don't think it's that different than living in the US aside from walking everywhere.