Update and the Dreaded B-Day

Although certain members of the B&B team have been known to spend a considerable time on rightmove.co.uk planning a potential move, things in Canada have gotten a good deal better than the last post. To wit:

1. BMD's PHD is coming along swimmingly. Although being far away from advisors is a challenge, her sticktoitiveness is gaining a result;
2. BD's job is coming along swimmingly. It really is a pleasure to work at McMaster and, even better, to live so close to work.
3. BMD Postdoc plans are progressing well especially since one potential supervisor has offered funding until independent means are established. Awesome!

So, even though every phone conversation with a certain Derbyshire Midwifery Senior Lecturer tugs on the heartstrings, things are pretty positive. It will be interesting to see how things shake down.

In other news, the B&B team has celebrated one birthday already and one is scheduled to occur tomorrow. That is if BD were having birthdays anymore. Regardless of whether the birthday is acknowledged by BD, it is nice to be home where family and friends make a bit of fuss over such things. Cake! Presents! Drinks! Food!

All of these things are, it must be said, a titch better than just Facebook well wishes (which are certainly appreciated as well!)

Is there Life to England Yet?

Greetings! B & B intended to never post on this blog again. It's been 9 months since we did so and about 280 days since we left Manchester and arrived home on a very cold day in December. So why are we posting here now? Originally, the purpose of this blog was to keep people informed of our adventures in England (and oh what adventures they were - getting a telephone, the multiple mistaken trains to York, the briefcase bartender, the Glasgow bombing, the flooding, the trips to Dublin, Achill, Moffat, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, the Whiskey Trail, London, Plymouth, Paris, etc.). But a funny thing happened on our way to staying in Canada forever: we miss England. Oh sure, there is lots not to miss - the crowds, the rain, the expense, the grimness (Charles Dickens was right, Leeds can be the most wretched city in England). But of all the things that we miss in England, it is the opportunity for BMD to work at her dream job that is the biggest. When we started the PHD idiossey we didn't think her options in Canada would be as limited as they now appear to be. So something has to give.

So the purpose of the blog has evolved. Now, the blog will serve as a record of our thoughts and impressions as BMD winds her way through the final stage of the PHD process - the dreaded writing of the thesis. Hopefully, when the time comes to make The Big Decision, what we have written here will help us. If all goes according to plan, it's 280 days until we'll need to decide. Decision '09, let's call it.

As of today, there are Midwifery professorships advertised at the following universities Ireland and the UK: Dublin, Dundee, East Anglia, Canterbury, Surrey, Bournemouth and Southampton.

Yikes, that's a lot of opportunity.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

So you want to move back to Canada to spend more time with family?

When the gods want to punish us, they grant our wishes…..

We have been able to spend lots of time with our families since our arrival back in Canada. We lived with the Davis family for a few days before having lots of family help as we moved back into our house. We had lots of family time over the holidays…Christmas Eve, Christmas Day with both families, boxing day, an extended family gathering on the 27th, plus a few bonus activities like helping Beth’s parents move, a girls outing to the Ballet with Brent’s mom and sister, a house blessing, New Years with Stephen and Pleuntje, an impromptu trip to Niagara Falls, a few dinners here and there, dog-sitting for the Davis family puppy….and the list goes on. And, we’ve only been home for a month! Even when we don’t plan things they seem to happen spontaneously…we went out for dinner last weekend and who should arrive at the same restaurant but Clint, Jennifer and Brad!

All joking aside, it has been great. We have enjoyed every minute of our time with our families since we returned home. It is part and parcel of just what we were missing in Leeds. After all, we never bumped into Clint, Jennifer and Brad on a Friday night at a restaurant in Leeds.

Here are some pics of our fun times with family over the last few weeks….

Canucks

We arrived back on Canadian soil on December 5th, 2007. All the travel went smoothly and we were greeted with balloons and Canadian paraphernalia at the airport. The -8 degree weather was a bit of an assault on the senses when we walked out of the airport, but we managed to keep our whinging to a minimum. We had a wonderful dinner with our families that first night back before crashing into bed.

Since that day, we’ve been in the process of reacclimatizing to Canadian life. Our main focus has been to reconnect with family and friends and to ease back into life. Life in England did at times feel like some kind of extended vacation and although we were eager to get back to ‘real life’ there has certainly been some feeling of wishing the vacation did not have to end. This is inevitable. But we know that being with family and friends and a feeling of belonging are what we have been longing for and we have certainly found that again in the many gatherings and social events over the last few weeks.
















The white coating of snow on everything when we arrived, and the 35 cms of snow that fell two weeks later certainly helped remind us of our former Canadian lives and of a love of the white stuff that must be deep in our bones. We would gladly take a cold, snowy, day with a crisp, bright, blue sky any winter’s day over the grey, overcast, dark days of winter in England. It is amazing what a difference that can make. Not sure our bodies can handle all the Vitamin D we must be getting from the sunshine.















Other early highlights of our adjustment back into Canadian life include our amazement at the size of the grocery store, our first taste of buttered popcorn at the movie theatre, being ‘car’ people again, eating an unlimited supply of chicken wings, drinking an unlimited supply of Canadian beer, doing the biggest grocery stock-up of the year and having it be the same price we would pay for a week of groceries in England, baking Christmas cookies and not having to ‘get creative’ with half of the ingredients, putting up our Christmas tree, reacquainting ourselves with all of our furniture and other stuff that was in storage while we were away.

We have also accomplished a few major things in the last few weeks. We have a new car. We negotiated the lease for it on our first full day in the country. Not too shabby. Wonder what kind of a deal we could have gotten if we were actually fully awake and not jet lagged? We moved back into our house on the first weekend we were back. We’ve managed to unpack most of our boxes and are feeling pretty well settled.

So we are settling in. We are starting to understand the new ‘normal’ of life back in Canada and we are enjoying every minute of it!