30 up The tea room afloat

[UniS]

Welcome aboard.

The first rule of the tea room is - No fisticuffs.
The second rule is - Put the kettle on and lets have a or open a bottle of if its that time of day. Pull a sofa and relax. Parents of one, more (or less) children are welcome to hop on board and chat about anything and nothing. Introduce yourself if new and if you name change give us clue please.

Oooooh, cranberry. I LOVE cranberry -- dried, jellied, sauced, juiced. Mmmmm. Oh, I'm going to attempt to make my own cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fingers crossed!

(Apologies for the poor grammar in the previous post -- I really should be in bed!)

How was the film, Maud?

Mmmmm, I do love blackcurrants. I planted a blackcurrant bush this summer, it might be a couple of years before it does very much but I'm already thinking about homemade jam...

The film was very funny!

We make an cranberry and orange sauce to go with the turkey at Christmas, having got the recipe at a Thanksgiving dinner.

I am delirious with tiredness so am going to bed. Good night everyone!

Night Maud.

'Tis the witching hour so I am heading off to bed as well.

Night Scout!

MrScout is, for the most part, a difficult person to shop for as his likes/wants/"needs" are so geeky-specific. Soon after we started dating he bought me one or two of these books as something I should read to learn more about British culture. I see there is now the complete series in a box set. Do you think it would be a good gift to the man who doesn't read books for fun (owns mostly manual type books and magazines) but who has definite ideas on "classic books" and "books of his youth are classics/must haves" with the hope that he'll read them to ToddlerScout?

G'night Maud! G'night bean! G'night rest of the lovely tea roomers.

Oh you lot have got me craving a rum cocktail . Rum, pineapple juice, mango lemonade and some seltzer. All of which we have. And here I'm trying not to have any alcohol (too many bloody calories). Grrr.
Well, I shouldn't be drinking DH's rum anyway. It's really good rum, the kind he drinks neat. He says using it as a mixer is like using Dom Perignon to make mimosas. I actually get that so felt really bad when I sneaked a couple of ounces of it Friday night when he was away. :o

I used to drink vodka and blackcurrant.

Thumb - sounds a great night out!

JM - That's great news about the prenatal yoga!

Maud - Do you guys have a babysitter? I would love one!

I'm generally grand (Irish speak for fine ) but really he is gone from thurs morning to mon dinner time,which is excessive I think. Thumb, before you asked could we move nearer to dh's workplace to see him more. It would not make any difference I'm afraid. He works in residential care, so he sleeps there and works solidly from when he arrives in dublin until he leaves, so being near him wouldn't still allow us to see him! And here I have a great community of people around us.

Deer, it was!
Maybe you should start reading something like War and Peace, or the whole Lord of the Rings set, or something! I don't know. I quite like the time when DH is away on business but I think it would start to pall if it was every week, same as you have to deal with. What about if you start a book club at yours? so everyone has to come and entertain you one night a week? Or maybe cocktail night!

JM - congrats on the yoga position (geddit? )

My blackcurrant mix was with Guinness - good way to learn to drink it, I found. I stopped the day the inexperienced barperson but the blackcurrant in first and the Guinness came up with a purple head.

miniThumb is learning the hard way about Christmas. He keeps seeing things that he "really needs, Mummy" and I keep telling him he has to wait until Christmas now - so he says "can we go to Christmas please?" MIL seems to have blown the whistle on the main gift this year - a trampoline - miniThumb told me this morning that Father Christmas was bringing him one. No ifs and buts, it was a definite. Am not happy but hey.

Hello! Just finding you all again!

I made my lovely cranberry flapjack yesterday! Have given some to the family that take my daughter to church, hope they like it! Think I will have a bit after my dinner!

LD&M - Yes we do have an occasional babysitter, but mostly we take The Girl with us. She loved Johnny English, maybe because she also likes MI High (kids' tv drama in which teenage secret agents solve mysteries). Our babysitter is a local teenager who we already knew as the older sibling of one of The Girl's friends. The Girl adores her and we get an occasional night out at something unsuitable for a pre-teen.

Scout - don't attempt to eat a whole fresh blackcurrant - they are Very Unpleasant. I love blackcurrant anything - cheesecake, yoghurt, sweets, drinks - anything except fresh blackcurrants, which are vile. My Dad grows them in his back garden - you couldn't make me eat them now. The seeds are big and bitter and covered in some kind of fibre that is like the stuff on the inside of banana skins (if you've ever tasted that by accident) - furs your teeth up.
That Famous Five book set is very good value! I'd quite like it for miniThumb but I'll survive without it, unless the Book Depository are doing it cheaply as well.

Maud - was that Johnny English II? is it any good then? Have seen mixed reviews and the last film that had mixed reviews that we ignored, we shouldn't have (the Zookeeper).

Yes, Johnny English Reborn. Let's face it, it's never going to be Ingmar Bergman, but it had some genuinely funny jokes and was pitched at the right level to appeal to children of The Girl's age. She loved, for example, the visual gag where Johnny is exaggerating his claims to be a helicopter pilot and takes the tops off a row of ornamental trees. The Bloke and I, on the other hand, liked the running gag about MI7 (sic) being Toshiba British Intelligence ... Spying For You.

I just had to look up The Zookeeper. It's connected with Adam Sandler. 'Nuff said!

LittleDeer loves Mr Bean, he practically falls off the couch laughing whenever he watches it. At the mo he is listening to the audio book of Alice in Wonderland - the type of entertainment both of us enjoy!

Thumb - I was thinking about a bookclub, but thought I'd only ever be able to turn up to it when it was at my place. But perhaps I could arrange something in the house. Btw, I am still reading Anna Karenina so I have my hands full on the reading front. I am also reading Michael Palin's Himalaya.

Scout - I love love love The Famous Five. I still have all of mine from when I was a child, on the shelf, waiting for LittleDeer to get a bit older. So far he has read The Magic Faraway Tree.

Yes, we didn't know about the Adam Sandler connection. Just had seen the actually rather funny trailer - didn't realise they'd used ALL the good bits in the trailer! Whereas our previous ignore-the-reviews effort had turned out rather well (Mr Popper's Penguins). Shall make renewed efforts to avoid anything to do with Adam Sandler from hereon in.

Deer - am of The Magic Faraway Tree - I never owned it as a child, my best friend did though and I was always reading it at hers. Should really get that for miniThumb as well...

I have already got the full collection of Just William stories, and the full Beatrix Potter, and all the Winnie-the-Pooh, and Paddington Bear (thank you The Book People!) and also 50 Thomas the Tank Engine books - but they're not the same as the old ones (I have about 3 of the old ones) :(

Good (early) morning everyone. It's 06:20 here, we've been up since 05:30. Gah. This is the huge drawback of JB going to sleep early (for him) - 8 pm. I know that's late by British standards but I think we do things a bit differently here, he normally goes to sleep around 8:30, 8:45 pm and then sleeps until 7 or so.
And he's not a child who seems to need a ton of sleep - 9 1/2 to 10 hours is long for him. His former daycare supervisor told me once (in her annoyingly superior 29-year-old "I know everything about small children because I have two and I run a daycare, and you're an over-the-hill mother of one" voice that in her oh so extensive three years of experience that 3-year-olds "must have" between 11 and 13 hours of sleep in 24 hours. Really? I'm sure it applies to some children, but by no means all - and I'd like to know exactly HOW to get a wide-awake 3-year-old to go to sleep at the snap of a finger, or how to keep him asleep when he's clearly had enough sleep and is wide awake!!! . Oh, I'm so glad JB is out of there, she made me feel so inadequate, and even like there was something wrong with JB because he was having so much separation anxiety. I wish I'd seen sooner what I know now - he simply didn't like it there because it wasn't a good fit for him. TBF I don't know what I would have done about it until he was able to go to preschool but it would have helped my stress levels enormously. She actually said to me one time: "so we were painting today, and JB covered ten sheets of paper with black paint. Now I've never taken much art therapy, but I really think it's time to talk to someone" - meaning a child psychologist. WTAF!!!!! I asked JB later why he'd done that, and he said "I like black. Tomorrow I'm going to use green.". Right. Clearly a maladjusted future cereal killer.
Sorry, I guess that turned into a rant. Funny how now that he's out of that daycare, JB is having a blast a preschool and has no problems being away from us. I wish I'd been able to make that change a long time ago.

Anyway - it's bloody early and I'm sucking down coffee. It's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. DH is away, and JB and I have been invited to a friend's house for a lovely turkey dinner. She's even minding JB for me so I can go teach my yoga class first [total star friend emoticon].

Is there a dining room on this barge? If so, you'll find a traditional Canadian Thanksgiving dinner in it. Roasted turkey with sage and onion stuffing, roasted mixed veg, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and apple-rhubarb crumble. Enjoy!

Oh, and buckets of of course :o

Oo, I didn't know that Canadians had Thanksgiving as well - what do they have it for? [interested emoticon]

JM - she sounds like an insufferable knowitall annoying person to deal with - glad you have JB away from there.

Wow! What a fantastic spread. Thanks, JM.

The Girl's sleep cycle has always been like JB's. She's always gone to bed quite 'late' by English standards, but we chose to do it that way so that we could all eat together in the evening and she could see her dad before she went to bed. I was always a bit when other mums complained that their child work up every day at 5am and wondered to myself whether that was in any way connected to the fact that they were in bed at 6pm.

Um yeah, Maud, ya think?? :o

My biggest problem when JB goes to sleep early, esp when DH is away, that I start puttering or reading or MNing and stay up wayyyyy too late. And then I'm shattered when he wakes up early the next day - duh.

Thumb, Thanksgiving in Canada, as it is in the U.S., is a "thanks for the harvest" type of festival. Wikipedia article here, quite informative.

Gosh it is wet out there - no I did not fall in the canal...

This is very convenient! There we were, walking back past the canal basin in Skipton, and there you were on the Tea Room Narrow Boat.

I just had to come in!

And my hay pile is all ready. You are very kind.

Hands Donki a towel and a bucket of carrot wine to help her warm up.

Thankyou UniS. Aah, that's better!

May I recommend a visit to Skipton Castle whilst we are here? It is a very fine edifice!

Coo. The magic of the tea room strikes again - we've gone from Cairo to Skipton in 24 hours. Can I put in a request for Flamborough Head, too?

I don't remember a canal at Flamborough.... we could always try though.