Settling in

Funny thing here, it is bright and sunny which is very deceiving because you get out of the car or house and it’s actually freezing. At the moment the weather here is like an Adelaide winter at its worst. Very windy around 7 to 10 degrees C, but we can still get around. At the end of our street are some horses which we have fed a few times. They are all lovely, about 15 of them and they are very eager to eat our carrots. Now I will save all of the veggie leftovers for them. The kids really liked feeding them. You can pay $20 for a ride. Mmmmm, maybe one day.

Next, we finally make it down to the beach and it is beautiful, not much different from an Australian beach except the sand is light brown in colour. Of course it’s very windy, but very exhilarating.

We decide to try a few of the smaller churches near to us during the week rather than drive 25 minutes into Charlottetown. The first morning we sleep in and miss church (which starts at 9am) because the sun doesn’t rise here until after 8am. They are coming to the end of their day light savings here and shortly will be turning their clocks back.

First day back to home schooling. The kids are very keen to get back into some schooling, which is great. Customs at Halifax had no problem with us home schooling they are very relaxed about it here and nobody seems to think twice about it. We are going to fall into line with the Canadian school holidays which means 2 weeks off over Christmas and then straight back into it right through, the winter until summer then we have 10 weeks off and will do a lot of travelling around.

Today's weather was probably the worst we have had so far, very windy, cold and rainy. The rain was going sideways. 20th Oct. set our clocks and alarms for this morning and managed to make it to St Peters for 9am Mass (we were still a few minutes late). A nice Spanish priest and about 10 older people in the congregation. Some nice older women made a fuss over Eve and Helena saying what a lovely family we have and asking who we were. Came home and got on with the schooling.

Mid afternoon a large crane and trucks with a house on the back arrived over the road . Quite amazing, by the end of the day we now have a neighbour directly across from us who wasn’t there yesterday.

The third Sunday on the island and the kids are starting catechism classes one hour before church with the other children from the parish, about 50 children in all separated out into their grades. Many of them are home schooled. I’m glad to hear that they all really enjoyed their class. After Mass we are introduced to more families in the parish. They are all lovely families. Some say they will invite us over for a ‘cook out'.

The weather here still isn’t too bad (end of Oct.). Every few days there is one that you could hardly call cold. It depends a lot on the wind. One day there was a warm wind and the temp. got up to 16 degrees c!