Almost ready!

Alyssa's first year of Grad school starts in about a fortnight. She'll go to some orientation for her teaching assistantship, take her entrance exams, and begin in the first week of September! She's been studying her butt of since we got up here, and I know she'll do great.

Odin's school will also be starting. We have an appointment on the 7th to meet his teachers, and then we spend the first week going to school with him based on their adjustment schedule, to help ease kids in to their new school. (Odin will just jump right in and never look back, but not every kid is like that.) We're also going to sign him up for hockey lessons, and a French class. I'm learning French with a woman from Paris whom I'm helping with her English, so hopefully I'll be able to keep up with Odin and we can try to talk to each other en Français.

Freya is getting more and more talkative. She can form sentences, and understands a few tenses and even participles. We're trying to potty-train her right now, with slow but reasonable success. We're also trying to get her to eat more solid food and nurse less. It's slow, but we'll get there.

I've been subjecting the kids to music whenever I hang out with them (cleaning the house together, playing in a room while Mommy studies, etc.) and it is interesting to see what they like. They love The Beatles and a lot of Elton John. The like most rock like AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and heavy metal like The Black Mages and Metallica.

Oh, almost forgot! We have internet at home now! That's how I'm posting this. It's somewhat limited compared to the US, but still more than enough for us. So we can make internet calls now (voice or video) and check our email for messages and such.

We've found a pretty cool way to get groceries. They deliver them to your house, either as you order them, or on a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly schedule. You can tell them what things you want in your Standing Order (some items are discounted when added to a standing order), and which ones you want to come each week, or each month, or what have you, based on how fast you think you'll use it up and how often you'll need more. Our favourite thing about it, though, is the Harvest Box. The harvest box is a selection of produce that they make for you. They give you a long list (really long, it's got produce on it I've never heard of) and you select on there which ones you like or don't like, how often you'd like to see them when they're available, and what priority you want them in (in case there's something you want more than another thing even when they're both available). Then you just set a price limit (they help you estimate how much you need to spend to feed your family size 5 servings of fruit and vegetables per week), and they bring you one with each delivery. They let you see it first so you can make adjustments, but basically it makes a selection for you and just gets delivered.

As soon as we get our money, we're going to try it out. It's a lot easier to sit together on the computer and carefully select what we want (or need for the meal plans) based on our funds than it is to try and figure it out in the middle of the grocery store with two kids who really don't want to sit in the stroller.