Mrs.B

I’ve just crashed in my hotel room after walking around sunny Amsterdam for 4 hours with a friend I hadn’t seen for 15 years. It was so nice I have no words right now. Maybe tomorrow :)

We’ve been back in London for 2 days and I already miss the smell of the pine forest…

A year has passed already… The kids are still asking almost daily to explain what happened to Papa. And we try to explain. As best as we can. Hoping that they won’t (yet) figure out that life’s unpredictable like that – that sometimes really sucky things do happen and there’s nothing we can do about it… Other than just solider on and hold on to the memories.

So the western world is in Valentine’s Day mode at the moment – shop windows are full of pink and red love hearts and every other marketing email I get is about the 14th of February.

I am the wrong audience for all of this – I don’t get Valentine’s Day.

Do men need the pressure of finding yet another PERFECT present for the lady in their lives? (they probably still haven’t recovered from Christmas)

And ladies – do we really think that men want a Valentine’s Day present? (well, they might, if it comes in a form of putting a ribbon on yourself, but THAT can be arranged at anytime, right? ;) [...]

January

The 1st of January brought the Euro to Estonia and I made some new year’s resolutions that I sort of forgot about half way through the year. On 7th of January we found out that J’s dad is sick and this twist in our lives ended up defining most of the year for us.

At the end of January I started getting ready for Oskar’s birthday… [...]

Dear 22-year-old me,

congratulations on your graduation!

You’ve had great 4 years but now you’re keen to get out of Small Town, Missouri and start a grown-up life.

Funnily the one thing that worries you more than getting a job and being able to pay your bills is making friends now that school life is over… You just cannot imagine how you’ll ever make great friends again now that you’re no longer in an academic situations with all kinds of extracurricular activities. [...]

On Sunday morning I only dragged myself out of bed once I could smell the waffles from downstairs and knew that in order to have one before it’s too late, I’d have to get out of bed. I have such a hard life.

We had been out and about all day on Saturday, including a sort of a date night onto the late evening so to get ready for the morning’s birthday party for the 3-year old, we simply washed a ton of fruit and veg and opened a few packets of this and that from Waitrose :|

It’s been almost 6 months since our papa, J’s dad, passed away.

I have lost grandmothers and my own father over 15 years ago, but my grandmothers were old and my own father had never been in my life, so their deaths were sad but did not affect me much in the months or years that followed.

Contrary to those experiences of loss, I still find myself thinking about papa almost daily. It might be considered weird maybe because he wasn’t my own father, but [...]

13 girls and 7 boys came to our reunion. Most of us had studied together for 8 years so no one had trouble recognising each other. Except for that one girl who didn’t have flaming red hair anymore, she left a few people puzzled.

Amazingly our teacher, let’s call her Mrs S, didn’t recognize me. I know I was a bit ugly and awkward and had humongous glasses and big frizzy hair back then, but I didn’t think that I had turned into an unrecognizable stunner in the 20 years since :) [...]

Last Friday I grabbed my backpack containing two dresses and nothing much else and hopped on the plane to Tallinn.

I was flying alone and almost read an entire book during the flight. Flying without kids is really so very nice.

My sister and brother in law picked me up from the airport and after a quick stopover at their place, we drove 100km south to Haapsalu to stay at my mom’s place for the weekend. [...]

While I recuperate from the past weekend, I’ll share a few photos of the Museum of London.

We went there for the first time a couple of weeks ago with my sister’s kids who are staying with us for the month of August (yes, I have FOUR kids at the moment!! :|) and while the little kids didn’t really concentrate on anything specific, there was plenty of interesting things for them to look at and point to and ask questions about why were there no cars when the dinosaurs were around. [...]

Friday to Sunday it rained. Non stop. Just as my ark was almost ready, it stopped and the blazing hot sun came out again. James will hopefully get rid of his pasty London office-slave complection by the time we head back over there next Sunday. Today we checked out the castle in Haapsalu. Lots of [...]

When I came back from my massage this evening, all ready to take over from mom to get the kids to bed, THIS was the sight on the couch: Nice :) Tomorrow morning I’ll tackle running again, hoping today’s rain has cooled down the weather enough to last until then. My 9k route starts around [...]

I love Twitter, it’s so addictive but it’s also informative – on Friday I found out that Jamie Oliver is doing a food festival nearby on Clapham Junction and on Saturday we were some of the first people there :) Our first stop was to get food – the kids got fish and chips from [...]

I think I really am an Aussie at heart, I am just so ridiculously giddy with joy as soon as the temperatures hit close to 30° and I’m sweaty all the time. On Sunday I went for a run with the real Aussie and with his approval, left him behind halfway into our 9km run.  [...]