Baby's Room is Ready to Go

The baby's room has been done for a while but I hadn't gotten around to taking photos until a few days ago. We still have a few things to put away and I may move a few items around but I think almost everything has found its home. I hope baby will like it!

Change table, toy storage and laundry bin!

Crib all ready to go!

Biscarrosse All Lit Up

On Christmas Eve after we had our yummy dinner, Carlos and I decided to go out for a walk before having  dessert and watching a movie. Since we hadn't really seen Biscarrosse lit up at night, we thought it would be nice to head to the centre of town and take some photos of the light display.

Entrance to the Christmas market and skating rink

The tree

These lights came on in a wave! First none, then some, then all!

City Hall all lit up

It was a cool night and the streets were nearly deserted, as everyone was likely eating the Christmas Eve meal with family and friends. But it made taking photos a lot easier!

Christmas Eve Dinner

As I said in my earlier post, Carlos and I decided to make a special dinner for Christmas Eve, which is the more important day here in France. Partly because there are just the two of us here and partly because we wanted to make the meal our own way, we did a semi-traditional dinner on the 24th.

Table ready for the big meal

In the south-west of France, seafood is a big part of the traditional Christmas Eve meal, with many people having oysters and smoked salmon as appetizers along with the traditional foie gras. But because of my dietary restrictions we had to forgo all of those more traditional appetizers in favour of shrimp, which I marinated in a mixture of herbs and olive oil before frying them briefly on the stove.

Gambas just about ready to eat

The main dish in France is usually some kind of poultry, though the turkey they eat here is much smaller than the typical North American bird and is usually stuffed with chestnuts. Guinea fowl (pintade in French), capon (chapon), duck and goose are the other possibilities for poultry, not to mention chicken, though it is not generally 'special' enough for the Christmas Eve meal. Because it was just the two of us, I bought a 'turkey roast', which is similar to a pork roast, but the one I bought was cut into individual pieces. These I also marinated, but in my special turkey herb rub that I found at Thanksgiving and is a big hit at our house.

The meal is ready!

 We completed the meal with steamed carrots and broccoli (which are not at all traditional but I think they're yummy!) green beans sautéed with garlic and onions and pommes dauphine (both very normal at a Christmas Eve dinner), which you can see at the bottom in the centre of the photo below. Pommes dauphine, which may be called dauphine potatoes in English, are potato puffs made with mashed potatoes and choux pastry (water, flour, eggs and butter).

Everything looks so delicious... and it was!

And finally, we had the ultimate traditional French Christmas dessert: a Bûche de Noël (Yule log). It is typically made with sponge cake and flavoured buttercream frosting. Carlos' favourite flavour is Grand Marnier and I like the Moka cake, so we each bought individual ones... and unfortunately were so excited about eating them that I didn't get a picture! But here is an example of a traditional bûche decorated to look like a log, and of one where you can really see the rolled pastry.

And there you have it! Hope you all had a Christmas meal that was just as delicious!

The Night Before the Night Before Christmas

Happy Christmas Eve Eve! Today we finished all of our shopping for tomorrow's meal. The 24th is the important day here in France and we're going to follow that tradition and make a semi-traditional Christmas Eve meal tomorrow night. (and if you're curious about what 'semi-traditional' means, stay tuned for another post explaining this at a later date!)

I still can't believe Carlos has been off for a week! We've had a few appointments so perhaps that's why I feel like he's only been home for a few days. It's been great to relax and hang out, but we haven't been completely idle since last Friday.

Since Carlos is on holidays and finally has been able to put his schoolwork aside, we've set out to do a few things around the house. One of those was to get something to put on the wall behind the stovetop to protect it from humidity etc. We had found something we liked quite a while ago at a Home Depot-like store not too far from us but debated about getting it, as it wasn't quite the height we were looking for. But when we went out to the store on Monday and saw how much we still liked it, we decided to go for it.

Before we drilled. Looks pretty good!

We installed the tempered glass backsplash on Tuesday and are really happy with how it looks!

All done! So much better than having to worry about stuff splattering all over the wall!

We've also gotten the bathroom mirror ready to be installed on the wall and have picked out the outdoor lights for either side of the sliding glass door. I've also done a bit of crafting but have had a few hiccups along the way so unfortunately I have no finished products to show yet. And this afternoon Carlos and I did a bit of marking. Since that's his least favourite thing to do for school, I'm always glad when I can help him out.

Still can't believe it's almost Christmas!

Decorating!

This Sunday we found some time to decorate the tree and the house for Christmas. No outdoor lights this year but we'll see if we can find something for next year. The neighbours across the street also put up their lights on Sunday and it seems as though everyone else in the neighbourhood has their tree up and ready to go. It was fun to put on the Christmas music and decorate together, especially after the busy week we had.

The finished tree! I have a tradition of buying a new decoration every year. This year's addition was a pair of wooden reindeer wearing Santa hats, one holding a tree, and one hiding a present behind its back.

Gosh, didn't realize how big my belly looks now!  I look ready to pop. As you can tell by the smiles, though, we were having a ball.

A garland we bought at Jardiland decorated with some of our favourite decorations.

Crafting fun!

Look what we made! Started off with a plain wreath, then added holly and decorations.

And to finish, some mistletoe and our front door! Our house feels a lot more festive now.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

It's time for Christmas flowers!

Just a quick entry to say that we went out and bought our tree yesterday! We had planned on going out last weekend but Carlos had a lot of work for his class meetings and his computer got hit by a virus on Saturday night, which effectively ruined our to-do list for the rest of the weekend. But they still had good trees left and I'm happy with the one we got. Because Carlos loves poinsettias, we ended up picking out a second one while we were at the nursery.

Freshly home from the nursery!

We didn't have time to decorate the tree since we were due to go to the hospital to visit the maternity ward and attend an informational meeting about breastfeeding (which both went very well despite going quite late - I do feel more informed and prepared than I did before) but hopefully we'll be able to do that before the weekend.

Liberating the tree

And finally, on the way home from the nursery I broke down and got out the Xmas music. I'm still a bit shocked that the first time we heard Christmas music this year was the 7th of December. How did we go a whole week in December without hearing any?! Either we haven't been shopping at the right stores or the French are much more reasonable than North Americans when it comes to starting to ring in the season...

Our smaller but sparkly poinsettia

We've got mail!

Baby's room! Stroller and car seat in background.

Light fixture, crib mattress and furniture boxes.

Drying laundry outside on November 28th?!

We've been getting packages galore the last few days! Lots of stuff from family and friends has ended up in our mailbox since the beginning of last week. Baby's not even born yet and  is already super spoiled! (and will be dressed in many super cute things from back home!) Carlos has this idea in his head that because of this generosity we'll have enough baby clothes that we'll never have to wash anything... you can tell laundry is not his favourite chore!!

So, thanks again to everyone who has sent us baby things. As of this morning everything has been washed, so now it's a matter of putting everything away and soon it will all be ready to go!

I've been spending a fair amount of time organizing the baby's room and putting clothes together for the baby's hospital stay bag. I'm a bit in advance with that, especially since I have barely started putting together my own bag for the hospital stay. But it has been fun to go through clothes and organize the closet. I'm definitely caught up in the typical 3rd trimester nesting behaviour!

But the baby's room is still a bit of a mess at the moment, especially with the stroller and car seat taking up space. My plan is to have things a bit more organized this weekend and take some nice photos of the room. In the meantime, the photos above are just a sample of things as they looked when we first bought furniture for the baby's room (and a photo to make all of you in cooler climates jealous - we're still drying our laundry outside! Not for much longer though, I think...)

This week, Carlos has his first end-of-term meetings, we have an appointment with the local midwives to talk about preparing for birth, and at the end of the week we're planning on getting our Christmas tree! I'll be sure to share photos, and I can assure you that I'll be thinking of all of you back home when we decorate. :)

The First Post

At the Dune du Pyla

Hi there, everyone!

We've been talking for a while about the best way to keep everyone in the loop on the happenings here "en France" and, in the end, we decided to start a blog. Itseems like the easiest way to update everyone on how things are going, especially since we can share both a written summary of our life and the photos that go along with it (I've already had a lot of requests for those, and the little one isn't even born yet!). So if you have the address for the blog, feel free to pass it on to family and friends that haven't heard about it yet.

For the moment, there's not much to say. I'm officially less than 6 weeks away from my due date and the weeks to come are filled with appointments with midwives, the maternity services at the hospital, and even the local ophthalmologist. Carlos is also busy preparing for end-of-term meetings with his co-workers and for parent-teacher interviews. So there is lots going on but we're both healthy and happy, which is the most important thing.

Hope you all are doing as well as we are!