Announcement!

I figured I better not make you wait any longer for this announcement I teased you with in my last post. I don't think I can handle anymore threatening emails! Just kidding, there weren't any threatening messages...just a little verbal abuse and some name calling, no big deal. But I fully admit I had it coming.

Before I tell you what's up, first I want to share with you some interesting statistics. I did actually get a lot of messages about this, and everyone who wrote to me had a guess as to what this announcement may be. 

Here are your guesses and the percentage of how often that guess occurred:

"Are you pregnant again?!".......100% 

Seriously, 100% of you who wrote to me about this think that I'm about to tell you I'm pregnant again.

Here's another statistic:

YOU WERE ALL 100% WRONG! 

But good try, better luck next time!

No, I am NOT pregnant again! Sure I might still wear the maternity jeans every now and then but that does not mean I'm growing baby #2....it's simply because I still have a rather Kardashian-esque booty. That's all! But I have to say, I did find it pretty funny you all thought the same thing.

So here is the announcement that shockingly, none of you guessed:

WE'RE COMING TO CANADA!!!!!!

Wooooooo hoooooooo!!!!!! There isn't enough room on this page for the number of exclamation marks needed after that 'Woo hoo', that's how excited I am!

Before I get too carried away, we don't have all of the details worked out just yet, but here is what we DO know:

• Sometime between mid October and mid November Eleni and I will be coming home to stay with my parents until probably sometime in April
• Why? Because I have a massive student loan payment I have to pay every month, and considering this is a summer holiday destination, it's not that easy to make the payments during the winter months when we don't have any tourists....SO the bottom line is that I need a job and there just aren't any winter jobs for me around here that would cover that payment

So at this point, that is all we know for sure. We're hoping that Antonis can come as well but we'll have to talk about what's going to happen with the restaurant over the winter....should we get someone else to come in and work for him? Could Lefteris and their parents handle it by themselves? Should we just save our butts off this summer so we can pay 5 or 6 months of rent and then close the place until next season? Maybe Lefteris will want to come with us and find a job too? Maybe none of these ideas will work and Antonis will have to stay here while we go to Canada? We don't know. But we DO know that Eleni and I will be there when the tourist season ends this year and we'll come back to Greece to get things ready for the beginning of the next season. And that will likely mean November to April, but we'll have to see how the season goes...maybe it will end earlier or later than usual, we don't know yet...and it also depends on when Greek Easter is next year because we'll need to be back here in time for that. 

So no, the news isn't quite as big as announcing a pregnancy but did I still manage to shock you? Are you excited????? I'm excited! Well, I'm not going to be that excited if Antonis can't come with us but I'm sure we'll figure something out, so for now I'm pretty excited!! I can't wait to introduce Eleni to everyone! And she can't wait to meet you!

I'll be looking for part-time work so please keep your ears and eyes open and let me know if you hear of anything. I need to stay on the island because I want my Mom to take care of Eleni while I'm working, but since I know I'm only going to be there for about 6 months I'm not going to be too picky about what job I take. Ideally I'd like to get a couple of contracts to work with children with autism or other special needs, but usually that requires a full year commitment which I definitely won't be able to do. But you never know, something might work out with that which would be great. Otherwise, I've always loved working at gyms. And I don't like to brag but I'm kind of a legend in the waitressing scene....

Anyway, that's what's going on and I'll keep you all updated as decisions and plans progress!

Just a quick update about Eleni......I think she's decided that crawling isn't good enough for her because she's been spending most of her time pulling herself up to standing on EVERYTHING! She's also started babbling a lot. Her first one was "Dadadadadadada" and now it's "Baba!Baba!Baba!" so it seems as though after everything I do for her, Baba is her favourite parent. I'm not worried about it though....I'm pretty sure I'm going to be way better at playing Barbies than he is so I still have a chance at first place yet!

Here's a few photos from yesterday. Eleni and I went to the restaurant in the afternoon to visit Baba. She also met a horse for the first time yesterday but since I have a pretty intense (and irrational) phobia of horses, I was more focused on not being trampled, kicked or bitten then on taking pictures at that moment....but here's a few that Antonis and I took from the safety of inside the restaurant, far away from any giant, man-eating Clydesdales

Feeding time! 

I didn't know I was in the picture so I'm not looking particularly happy here, but I really was! 

I'm also not wearing any make-up so I hope I don't scare any of you!

Multitasking! Eating and trying to steal the camera away from Baba

Now we're both totally oblivious to Baba's photoshoot

Can I have it please? I promise I won't chew or drool on it!

Yiayia and Papous bought Eleni a walker last week...these are actually banned in Canada and you can't buy them anywhere because of how dangerous they are so I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. 

But she's not very good at it yet anyway and there weren't any stairs or cliffs around so it seemed to be ok at this particular moment.

Baba, I'm going to try really hard to get over there and when I get there, 

THAT CAMERA IS MINE!

This one's my favourtite!

Our budding chef, helping her Theo Lefteris in the kitchen

Type to you soon!

We're Crawling!!!

Just when I thought we were settling in nicely to a new routine, Eleni decided to pick up a new sport:

EXTREME CRAWLING!

I'm sure you're all familiar with regular crawling, but extreme crawling takes things to a whole other level! It's fast, it's reckless, and it takes you places you don't belong!

For the last few weeks Eleni's been testing the crawling waters....getting into position, trying a step here and there, falling down here and there. Oddly enough she mastered crawling backwards right away but going forward seemed to pose a bit of a challenge for her. But Thursday morning, as I was watching from the kitchen, she took one step...then she took a second step...then a third.....then she turned around to look at me, shrieked with laughter and TOOK OFF at hyper speed toward the tv stand with all it's hanging wires and interesting boxes with flashing lights (the modem, and various other internet, tv and telephone boxes and connections and such...whatever that stuff is called...in my new mommy language this stuff is just called DANGER!) 

So once again Eleni has managed to teach me how naive I am about parenthood. I've been encouraging her to crawl, thinking that she'd just toddle around a little, quietly and thoughtfully observing her environment from a new perspective.....What a fool!!! 

She's so fast you can't even take your eyes off of her for a second or she'll be in a whole other room of the house doing something completely destructive like emptying bookshelves, ripping electrical chords out of the wall, pushing over anything that's in a standing position. I think I even caught her in the beginning stages of building a small fire this morning. Seriously, anything that she should not do, or should not touch....she's doing it and/or touching it. And not in a nice or safe way either, she's literally trying to break everything in the house into a million tiny pieces. And then she laughs about it. 

Don't be fooled by this sweet little face. She's a danger to herself and society. And she's on the loose!

I've had 15 heart attacks in the last 4 days. I'm very proud of her, but holy man I'm a nervous wreck! The problem is that she started crawling about a week before we'd planned to baby proof the whole house. Figures! So now I'm running behind her 24/7 and baby proofing as I go, which, let me tell you, this is so NOT the way to do it! Looking back, I probably should have baby proofed everything around this time last year. But of course I didn't and once again I'm learning the hard way. C'est la vie! This week is Carnivale so Antonis has been really busy at the restaurant...this means I have one more day of following Eleni around with a safety net and fire extinguisher, and then Antonis will be able to help me get this place into Fort Knox-like security. By Tuesday I should be able to breathe again....

So I mentioned that it's Carnivale over here right now. In Greek it's actually called Apokries, which literally means "good bye to meat", because following Apokries we have Lent, which is supposed to be a time of fasting and sacrifice. I should probably explain this a little better, but I'll keep it short and to the point:

Basically, when Lent begins you turn into a vegetarian until Easter, and after that you can return to your heathen ways. Before Lent, this 3 weeks of Apokries, you're supposed to eat and drink and act like an ass as much as possible because for the next 40 days (Lent) you're gonna have to act like a saint, which is really hard to do so theoretically, if you let yourself go for Apokries, you should be able to handle Lent. Does that make sense? So we have a 3 week free pass to do whatever we want (Apokries/Carnivale)....with costumes involved by the way....then there's 40 days where you can't do a damn thing you want (Lent), and then Easter arrives and life goes back to normal.

So that's just a very short, non-religious description of what this holiday is all about. But anyway, there's people wandering around in costumes right now because it's Apokries.....Eleni was a strawberry....

She absolutely LOVES her little tutu with the strawberries on it! She kept picking it up to show everyone while saying "Da!" "Da!" It was so cute!

Yiayia and Papous with our froulitsa (little strawberry)

So sweet!

Tomorrow is Kathara Deftera which means Clean Monday, so it's the beginning of Lent but there's still some Carnival stuff happening around so Eleni and I are going to check that out with Maria and Michaela. I'll bring the camera along and tell you what happens because I've never actually gotten involved in the family stuff around here for Apokries...

If it's warm enough maybe Eleni will wear her strawberry costume again but we'll see what the weather's like. At least I got some pictures of her in it today just in case it rains tomorrow.....

So other than the crawling and the holiday, Papous is much better! Again! He went to Athens to have his pacemaker adjusted, again, and now he's back to his old self. He says he has some pain in his legs though and can't walk as well as he used to but seriously...he's 93! It's not surprising he has a bit of pain here and there. I'm 32 and I complain about my aches and pains. He's almost 3 times my age!

I also have a pretty big announcement to make but I think I'm going to save that for my next post............

Good night!