first week and the ups-and-downs

We are officially UK residents, temporarily. Yay. At some points in my heart, I couldn’t believe it.. because you know, finally.. it was just, finally.. Haha. Yos and I have been talking about it for ages, so when we arrived in this very country, we were just smiling to each other – widely (well, almost like grinning, though!).

Despite the excitement, our first week wasn’t so dreamy at all - especially with a one year old cranky baby (sigh). We stayed at our friends’ house for 5 days, who happened to be in labor on the day we arrived and her husband was still on pilgrimage. There was a funny story about it, because I was joking with her before my departure: that time I was asking about my rented house and the procedure to move in (it’s another long story) and I said “just in case you are in labor when I arrive!”. She shushed me because she expected her husband to be home when she gives birth. Who knows my words became real :D

The ‘journey’ to get in to our rented house itself pushed our sanity to the limit. The agent was irresponsible and gave us empty promises. So after tons of empty promises thrown, we finally got our key (yay!).. but.. the house was dirty. Dirty itself explains nothing like what we saw, it was unacceptably dirty. We were speechless.

In the end, to avoid further delay and further loss of sanity, we moved in with that ‘dirty’ condition and hired a professional cleaner to sterilize the whole house ~ which means extra price $$$

During these transition phase, I don’t fancy the changes of Iola’s habit. When we moved to Jakarta for almost a week, her highchair was left in Sentul, so she ate in no particular space and my parents kept feeding her while she was strolling around. This breaks her habit of eating on highchair, which I had been built for 6 months. And when we moved to UK, in early days she didn’t have a highchair to sit on, so we fed her on wherever we can put her, and mostly we skipped BLW to keep her clean (because most of the day, we were outside the house and we avoided making her shirt dirty). It was a bit ‘hard’ for me, because I was so determined making this rule, to make her understand that it’s a common practice to eat by sitting properly on the chair. *heartbreaks* Oh well..

Okay, wrapping up the downs-points, here what I love during our first week..

I love the weather upon our arrival, mostly, it was bright sunny days with cool breeze. 

We hung out in the park, ate our meals in the park bench, sipped our coffee while sitting on the grass without being an alien, strolled around Yos’ school (I pretended to be a student – yea rite – with a baby, haha..), and took Iola to the playground – she loves it. We walked for hours and didn’t feel tired. We enjoyed the weather, we loved to be outdoor, we explored the city, and we observed the people and daily life here.

Today, it’s already pass our first month being residents here. And, really.. nothing beats the feeling of becoming first week-ers ;) 

ps: the temperature is one digit nowadays ><
ps ps: you can follow my random posts while we live here on instagram with hashtag #nyijournal ;)