2009-11-26-Moving-With-Opal

As you all now know, life has been somewhat difficult of late and is going to be difficult for us all for a while. Please reach out to Elizabeth and offer her your support.

Over the last few days I've been moving into the new house with Opal. Opal has, so far, found this mostly fun as she's gotten to choose a number of things: her room (pink walls, second factor being the flowers on the light switch), purple towels, toothpaste (princess themed) and various other bits and pieces. She's also really into the two story nature of my place. Yesterday was the first day in the new house and involved a certain amount of back and forth in which Opal fell asleep in the car at 20:00, got woken up for some shopping, then we put together her new bed and she finally got to sleep around 22:00. This didn't stop her waking up at her normal time and waking me at 07:30 for breakfast (I'm not sure how long she was up before me, but there was a certain amount of cutting up cardboard and drawing evident when I got to her room).

A breakfast of toast and fruit (and getting to choose which cupboard the glasses go in) and then we went off on our bikes to explore the local park (there's a photo on Facebook of her enjoying the tire swing). After getting back, we put together her desk and then went to visit some friends. They have a son who's about 6 months older than Opal who would always sit in the corner and read whenever we visited about 6 months ago. Opal is now at this stage and spent the first hour or so sitting on the floor reading to herself. Eventually A. managed to convince her that doing a play involving her being the presenter and him being a clown was a good idea so they did that for a while (some of the costumes reminded me of Miazaki films). They also tried pillow fights (which A. enjoys a lot and D. was very upset that his parents put a limit of 2 children at a time on the activity), but Opal doesn't really find that much fun (which I was quietly relived by). A bit more playing and then I took Opal over to Elizabeth so the could go to Thanksgiving dinner with some friends of hers.

Paul