Well, Edinburgh is working harder to live up to its reputation. The weekend was relatively cold, windy, and wet, and today followed suit. I actually spent the entire day indoors (Monday is my writing day, anyway), and Lynn only left to get the kids to and from school.
The kids have been crankier. Kenna has become very recalcitrant, fighting about very small things like getting dressed, while also pestering her brother for attention. I would say she needed more attention, but she gets attention constantly and seems to have lots of friends at school. Lynn and I think it may be an environmental issue: the combination of the darkness outside and the cold air inside-- I think it's triggering hibernation-type effects where the kids at least, and perhaps Lynn and myself as well, are being prompted by our bodies to get more sleep and eat more calories. We've begun putting Kenna to bed earlier, and she's regularly sleeping 12+ hours each night now.
Taran is trickier. By last week we'd reached the point where we decided there was something in the food causing trouble, and so on Weds last we put him back on a diet without processed foods (I suspect the Cheerios, Lynn suspects the fluoride tablets), and he seemed to be doing better... and then we took the kids swimming on Friday. We'd gotten passes from British Gas for open swim, and the closest location was a hotel downtown. The pool itself and the facility were nice enough, but we've always seemed to have trouble with Taran and hotel pools. Perhaps the high chlorine level? Regardless, Saturday night Taran was coughing at bedtime, and we commented that it seems like everytime we take Taran to a public pool (other than the PAC which used an ultraviolet system to keep the chlorine amount down) he has coughing fits and behavior problems. Sunday the coughing was worse, and we gave Taran hydroxyzine, our standby for coughing/allergy/itching/sleeping problems, and he slept through the night soundly, but was coughing much worse this morning, and his behavior today was awful. We thought we'd seen behavior problems with the hydroxyzine, but he was just a wreck today. I think there is a sleep issue for him as well, and so today we moved their bedtimes forward 30 minutes. Kenna was asleep before 6.45pm, and Taran is now in bed and will hopefully be asleep by 7.30.
We had a nice visit with Eyal and Ionathan on Saturday, and Eyal's father brought us a basic Hanukkiah and kosher candles all the way from Israel. Taran's eyes lit up when he saw it, and he and Kenna spent the afternoon trying to get Ionathan (who is 2) to play with them, but he was just too shy, and of course they are loud and a bit crazy. Sunday we visited with Ashley's family (Ashely is one of my colleagues), and their three kids were just fantastic keeping our kids busy all afternoon while we ate and chatted. It was great.
Lynn is fully into the apartment hunt now. We're experimenting with the underfloor heating in the bathrooms, and my guess is that we're closing in on running the heat constantly while we're home (just in 1-2 rooms at a time) to keep warm. My appreciation for modern insulation methods now knows no bounds-- we could heat our entire house in Wisconsin in -20C weather for the cost of heating 2 rooms in this flat at 2C weather. I'm not sure how much better the heating situation will be in another flat, but it surely can't be worse, and if we're paying £200-300 less per month, that more than makes up the heating bill.
I can't seem to find enough writing time these days, but I'm really enjoying the networking within the University structure. I am trying to follow my supervisor's advice about sticking to my primary responsibilities, and have set boundaries where possible, but will need to do even better, as I'm just involved in too many projects right now. Soon I need to ramp up my research again, and I'll be even more busy once teaching really starts next term. The upshot is that I'm enjoying the desk research and writing so much I wish I could spend most of my time on it-- a strange conclusion from a person who expected to want to focus on teaching...
Cheers from mostly dark and a bit stormy Edinburgh!
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