Only Six Weeks to Go?!

We had an uneventful weekend around St. Andrews this weekend. After visitors and travel, I was a little low on energy and didn't want to do too much. John had a rugby fixture scheduled on Sunday afternoon that was two hours away, and I had been dreading that drive, so when I learned that the team was set to travel there by coach, I felt like I had been given the gift of a free day! The weather forecast was for cold temperatures for April, and a bit of sun, a bit of rain, a bit of cloud, and a bit of fog...all at the same time. Very British! So, with unpredictable weather on tap and a heap of laundry in the corner of each bedroom, we happily decided to stay home.

We did venture out a bit on Saturday morning...David and I went to town for a few hours in the various book shops and Emma and John took Leah to the playground, where she met a lovely boy named Archie, about which she is still talking. In the afternoon, I took John to the Morrison's grocery store. This was a trip that came about after a lengthy "discussion" at the dinner table on Friday night, and that "discussion" resulted from a quick run-in that we had had with John and some of his mates at the same grocery store on Friday afternoon. We had taken Leah there for a quick cup of tea (there's a lovely restaurant at the front of the grocery store with comfy couches and lots of windows), and as we were leaving, big groups of boys from Madras descended upon the store for their lunch, including John and his mate Saul, about whom we had heard much but hadn't met. Saul turned out to be a very handsome young Brad Pitt look-alike from New Zealand with a charming disposition, carrying a dozen jelly-filled donuts in a Morrison's shopping bag. We questioned them both about the donuts, and John was quick to assure us that they were Saul's, and Saul's alone. John's relationship with the truth in these situations has been a bit amorphous in previous instances, so I was a little skeptical.

John's school lunch, apparently

When John came home from school later that day, I noticed the outline of a soda bottle in his backpack and questioned him about it. At first he tried to hide the bottle, then fessed up to having bought it at the store, but insisted he wasn't planning to drink it. We launched into a "discussion" of this, and that "discussion" carried on into dinnertime. From that discussion, I learned that at lunch time, the usual practice is for John and all of his friends to put all their money into one pot on the way to the store, then run around the store gathering up as much soda and candy that they can, take it to a self-serve till, insert all of their money, then debit the soda and candy until the money is gone.  So, our discussion started out with a focus on healthy eating habits, but it then moved to issues of responsibility and ended with a long discussion of the importance of telling the truth. After a good few hours, it ended with John and me sitting alone at the kitchen table and ironing out a plan for how he was going to approach school lunch time in the future. The plan was a complicated one, but it did NOT involve our handing over £3 each morning with no questions asked about how it was spent, as we have been doing up to now. In any case, the Saturday afternoon trip to Morrison's was a bit of a recon mission for us, and was intended to help him figure out how to put his new lunch plan into practice.

On Sunday, we dropped John off at the rubgy pitch to meet up with his teammates for the coach ride to Aberdeen, then the rest of us took a quick drive to Dundee to do a bit of shopping. Leah is flirting with the notion of giving up her nappies in exchange for "pants" (FYI...don't make the mistake of using the word "pants" in the UK when you are actually referring to your trousers. Your story will take a very different and probably unintended turn if you do.) so we were in search of a cheap sheet of stickers to use as a reward for any "poo in the loo." On the Dundee high street, we found a "pound shop" that sold some decent stickers, along with a charity shop that had a number of good, used DVDs, so we walked away with a good collection for upcoming family movie nights. I also popped into the Marks and Spencer for a belt, which I neglected to bring from the US and have done without until now. As we walked down the high street, we happened upon the Disney store, which was promoting the Star Wars movies for some reason (pardon me for being out of the know on this, if there's some huge Star Wars movie coming out this weekend, etc.). In front of the store, there were two Storm-Trooper-like (again, pardon the ignorance on this score...) guys in front of the store, posing for photos and showing off their plastic light-saber-machine-gun-things (once again, pardon the...you get the idea.) Leah approached one with a bit of trepidation, and the Storm Trooper recognized this so offered his palm to her for a quick high five. She gave it, and then he, in that airy, halting, Storm Trooper voice, said to her, "Well done, Princess!" in a very Scottish accent. It was the first Scottish Storm Trooper I had ever heard! Leah was chuffed, and kept repeating all afternoon, "That sorm-sooper called me Princess!"

The rest of the evening was occupied with collecting John from his mates' house, gathering some leftovers for dinner, and putting away the now-cleaned pile of laundry. I had a few Skype meetings to conduct after bedtime (that's afternoon for you in the US, so a good time to set up meetings with students back at home), and when they were done, I had a quick look at our overall list of must-dos for our semester in Scotland. I realized with a bit of surprise that our remaining weekends here in Scotland are quickly diminishing, and we still have a very long list of things we want to do before we leave. This prompted me to count up our weekends, and I was devastated to realize that we have only six left! We have a weekend of travel planned with the students still, and two weekends that will include visitors, so after that, there's really not too much time left. I started to match up some plans for day trips with weekend days on the calendar, and before I got to the end of our list, I ran out of days. How sad! So, sometime this week I'm going to have to go through our list and prioritize what we really want to do and what we really, really want to do before we go, and start to make some cuts. Hopefully, they won't come off our list forever, but will just be moved to a list for a future trip to Scotland!