High points of the week

- I found a great vitamin store (Healthy Choices on Topsail Road) that has a lot of the supplements and speciality products that our family uses. Yay, yay, yay!! I'm still looking for a place to get organic meats -- let me know if you know of a good place...

- I found an online support group for Parents of Kids with Allergies... http://www.kidswithfoodallergies.org/. Yay, yay, yay -- now we don't feel so alone and have other parents to bounce ideas off of... I'm starting a support group here in Newfoundland and am looking for other families who are going through a similar situation.

- We made a great allergy-free meal today -- homemade banana bread and shepherd's pie with no gluten, eggs, dairy. It was very tasty!

- I've been able to continue to move my body (i.e., work out at a gym a couple of times a week) and think it's officially a part of my new rhythm and routine.

- I love living here and our home and it feels better and better everyday.

- I made a new friend! :-)

Topsail Beach

There are so many reasons to love living in Newfoundland, a major one, of course, is that we are on the coast...



We live about 10 km from Topsail Beach and we've spent a couple of mornings throwing rocks at the ocean...


Alex can literally spend an hour entertaining himself by throwing rocks into the ocean. So can his dad.

Counting my blessings

We are settling into our new home now and love living here.

It feels so good to be here, to be "home".

I haven't felt at "home" for a long, long time.

We are settling into our new routine and it feels good.

I've started moving my body again -- something that had fallen by the wayside in Calgary, but I've made a commitment to myself to make time for here. And, it feels good.

Mel and I are making time for ourselves and have started a weekly date night. (A big thanks to Mildred / "Grammy"). We had an amazing meal at the Casbah -- I highly recommend it -- and shared it with a friend (an old friend of Mel's and new friend for me) with whom I immediately had a heart connection with -- it was the answer to one of my prayers.

Alex loves spending time with this "Grammy" and we are so thankful to her for all of the countless ways she has supported us during this transition and in providing child care for Alex.

Alex has a cast on one of his lower legs, but he doesn't let it stop his jumping or running around or exploring one bit. I think he's actually quite proud of it, his "new boot", and his skills at getting around.

We went a church service today at a church within our community, just down the street from us, Mount Pearl United Church. Alex and I found a playroom in the church hall with lots of toys, so it was a definite fit for Alex -- they have a room with toys just for toddlers! I didn't get to hear much of the service, but it felt like a fit for Mel and my intuition is that it will be a fit for me. Another prayer answered.

Our new home

The moving truck arrived yesterday and we are busy unpacking boxes and setting up our new home together.

Did I mention how much I LOVE our home?

It feels so good in our home... There's already a lot of love in the house.

Before I left Calgary, our mailman blessed our family and also the house that we would be moving into. It was a beautiful blessing -- he spoke for 10 minutes or so about how we would be blessed in our new home in Newfoundland. He spoke of the home that we would create together, how we would know that our home had been chosen for us by God....

And, that's truly how the home feels to us.

We bought the house sight unseen in a community (Mount Pearl) that I'd never even been in, so it does seem amazing how much I love the home.

It's a modest-sized bungalow, but perfect for our small family and simple tastes.

There's a spacious backyard, almost half of which is treed and overgrown with shrubs and herbs.

The basement is fully developed as an apartment, and is currently being rented by the previous owner of the home. She'll be with us until the house that she is building is ready. We haven't yet decided if we'll continue to rent it if she moves out. If we can easily live on the one floor, then we will look for an amazing, mature, quiet, responsible tenant...

Alex loves our new home too... When we brought Alex to the house to look at his newly painted room, he jumped up and down and danced and got all of us to jump up and down and dance with him. Then, he lead us in a dancing, clapping, jubilant march around the house. We took turns dancing in his closet as well. And, sang a song about his room and his closet.

I love Mount Pearl!

We're not yet in our home in Mount Pearl as we are waiting for the movers to arrive, but I love Mount Pearl and the community that we will be living in! Mount Pearl is just barely a city with 26,000 people, but we have all of the essential amenities that we need close to home. We are only five blocks from one of the main streets in Mount Pearl, so we're close to our bank, shopping, our chiropractor, our dentist, video store, massage therapy, acupuncture and more. And, there are a number of schools and parks in our neighbourhood. We are only five blocks away from a river and walking / biking trail that leads to my mother-in-law (Mildred's) house (in one direction) and also to St. John's core (in the other direction). I haven't had time to do a lot of exploring, but there is also a pond / small lake nearby with walking trails around it. (Mel says that everything is called a pond here even if it's a larger body of water since next to the ocean, everything seems like a pond).

Mount Pearl itself flows seamlessly into St. John's (it almost feels like a community of St. John's), so we can take advantage of the amenities of a "larger "(yet small) city (of 100,000) (we're only around 8 km to the harbour). Mildred lives in yet another community, Paradise (pop. 12,000), which is only 4 km from our place!

I love that everything is close by!

Gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free raisin bread. mmm....

I'm thankful that Dominion has a GREAT gluten free section and I found a gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free raisin bread that Alex loves.

He loves it so much that he woke up at 5 am this morning to eat 1.5 slices of bread. Then had 2 more slices for breakfast, and 2 more for dinner.

He hasn't had bread for three weeks now, so he deserves it!

The beauty of extended families

Just a short post tonight because I'm sleepy, but I LOVE living in a community with family...

I love being part of one big happy family and I love that Alex has so many people around him who love him.

And a big thank you to Melissa again for painting our bathroom today!!!!!! :-)

Our new home gets a face lift

My husband and his cousin knocked down a couple of half-walls of our home, opening up the front hallway, livingroom and kitchen, giving our place more of an open feel. And the walls are lovingly being painted by my mother-in-law and sister-in-law to be.

And, we found our second car for our family -- again getting a great deal for a vehicle that was well taken care of...

Things are falling into place. There's so much to be thankful for!