And you also know it's Christmas when...

... you find yourself eating a Bendicks chocolate mint at 10am because the friends who visited you at the weekend and brought it with them did not do their duty and finish off the box before they left.  Honestly.  Call yourself some of my best mates?

...after your previous post about having run out cinnamon, various friends and relations leave smug comments on your fb feed - or worse, leave links to recipes for cinnamon biscuits.  Oh yes, sis, I'm looking at you... (not a sponsored post, by the way).

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

(Gosh yes my sides are splitting...)

The Gallery: Family

This post is for Wk 102 of Tara's Gallery. Click here to see all the other entries...

When I was younger and child-free, I always imagined I would quite like to have 4 children.  Well - 2 or 4; for some reason an even number appealed.  Then, I met my Husband, got married, and had babies - but just the two.  We were agreed that 4 would be nice, but the timing just didn't work out and now I have to admit to being quite relieved about that.  So instead of a big rumbunctious family with 4 children, we just have our two boys.

The summer holidays have already started for us (you may have heard me mention that fact once or twice, on here and on Twitter), and we're staying put for the next couple of weeks or so before we head back to the UK for a while, unlike many of our friends here in Moscow who jumped ship the moment the school bell rang.  "How are you going to manage?" they ask, concerned for my mental health.  "What will you do with the kids, stuck in Moscow with no school?  Won't you go crazy?"

Well, no, I won't.  Because in addition to setting up 'playdates' with various friends, I know that there is one resource my boys will have.  Four years ago, when they were 4 and 2 respectively, we took them to Australia for 5 weeks.  Apart from a couple of days in the middle and at the end of our trip when we met up with friends, and the odd occasion when they teamed up with other children wherever we happened to be staying, it was just the four of us.  We had a limited number of toys for them to play with, and were in almost constant motion for much of the time.  You would think that we might have gone crazy then, but during the 5 weeks a wonderful thing happened; our Boys discovered each other.  They became more than brothers, they became friends.

Nowadays they're like any other brothers; they play, they fight, they playfight, they learn from each other, they comfort each other in the dark at night, they  tell rude jokes, they make each other laugh, sometimes they make each other cry, and then they make-up and start the whole thing over again.

 But no matter what, they are - and always will be, I hope - each other's family.

Who said visitors go off in 3 days?

My parents are visiting us here in Moscow at the moment.

There's nothing like showing people around to reinvigorate your interest in the place that you live, don't you agree?  Since they arrived on Saturday, we have visited the Moscow Botanical Gardens, seen the ecto-plane and submarine berthed not far from where we live, and taken a stroll down the Old Arbat (once upon a time the hangout for the artistic community of Moscow, now a somewhat less glamorous strip of souvenir and coffee shops).  We've taken them to a friends for dinner where they were royally entertained, showed them around the Boys' school, and my father has made a new - Russian - friend who this morning took him to an abandoned airfield to see old helicopters and dead airplanes in their final place of rest before they are retired to the scrapyard.

We've made plans to see the 9th May parade tomorrow, will throw in couple of art galleries, a walk through Gorky Park, some listening to nightingales, and a train ride or two to entertain the anoraks in the family (I'm looking at YOU, Boy #2 and Dad), and before we know it, it will - much to our dismay - be time for them to leave again.

At which point, I imagine they will be delighted to get home again, for a bit of a rest...

Family Sayings, PM-style

My bloggy mate Expat Mum has published a post sharing her family sayings, so thought I would give you a few of mine.  Because, you know, it's Saturday and why not? (Not a family saying, by the way).

The Man Look

This one comes from my mother but is now in family-wide use, and refers to the special talent some of us have (not only men, obviously.  But mostly men, in our family at least) for walking into a room and saying "But I can't find the cereal / mobile phone / remote control..." when the object they're looking for is lying in plain sight - just not, crucially, in the exact spot that they looking at.

Not as green as I'm cabbage-looking

I tend to use this when I'm trying to explain that whilst I may appear foolish, I am indeed smarter than that.  Honest.

Step AWAY from the ---- (insert word of choice, be sure to stress 'away')

Refers to those US cops & robber shows when the police are telling the criminal to 'step AWAY from the vehicle / gun / pile of money on the floor'.  We tend to use it in slightly less serious circumstances, when someone who should know better (Husband, me) is caught with our hands in the biscuit tin / bowl of crisps / chocolate cupboard.  Oh, the glamour of my life knows no bounds...

Which leads me to:

Oh, the glamour of my life knows no bounds...

'Cause we're expats, right?  It's supposed to be glamorous.  Ha!  Generally used in those moments when I find myself unpacking the washing machine for the nth time that day, wiping crzp from my shoe, am stuck in traffic avoiding the eye of the police officer on the side of the road, or am about to plunge into the weigh-your-own fruit and veg aisle at the hypermarket...

What are your sayings?

'Oh to be in England' now that it's May*

It's a special kind of torture for me, visiting the English countryside in May.

I don't get homesick, as a rule. I prefer to try and live in the moment, and look ahead to the future than to wallow in the past and what might have been. I love my life in Moscow - well, most of it, anyway. Sure, London is where I feel most complete, most grounded but I wouldn't want to have missed out on this chance to be in Russia, and to shake things up a little, to 'live a life far from prozac' (Husband's expression, not mine, but it's apt enough for me to have nicked it here).

But I'm only human, and I have always thought May the most beautiful month of the year to be in England, with the blossom, the briar roses in the hedges, the still-fresh colours and a sense of newness everywhere. Oh, the weather's not reliable, I know that; after weeks of blazing sunshine, the rain came down - on and off - on my brother's wedding on Saturday. But it was as much off as on, and still warm, and frankly if you want guaranteed sunshine on your big day the best piece of advice I could give you is to go to Las Vegas (I write that as someone who also had rain on her wedding day and really, it didn't spoil a thing...).

So I have to admit that yesterday morning, driving across Salisbury Plain with clouds scudding across the sky, more shades of green in evidence than I would ever have though possible, and surrounded by the beautiful rolling landscape, it was hard to come to terms with the fact that we were headed for Heathrow and that journey's end - yesterday, anyway - was Moscow, Russia.

"Look at that..." I said, misty-eyed to Husband as we took the back road to Shrewton over the plain, surrounded by the sort bucolic loveliness I had grown up with in the Cotswolds but which I had mistakenly thought no longer had much effect on me.

He looked at me as I blinked back the tears. "You can take the girl out of England, but you can't take England out of the girl."

Truer than I had realised.

*with apologies to Robert Browning. Although to be fair, in the second verse of the poem - you can read it here - he does wax lyrical about May, too...