New digs

So we're here, in northwest London... in a charming, spacious and slightly strange residence that will be our home for the next 12 months. Here's our location: we're near the Swiss Cottage tube stop, about halfway between Regent's Park and Hampstead Heath in a neighborhood known as Belsize Park and close to another called St. John's Wood. Our street is lovely, a long row of old world, red brick Victorian fancy mansions (dotted with the occasional post-war modern ugly structure, in a typical London juxtaposition). Our house, like most of these, was long ago converted into flats -- one for each of the 3 floors -- and we have the "garden flat", in this case an appropriate name because there is in fact a very nice garden in the back: a bit too steep for Sadie & Parker to run around back there, but very nice to look at, and in those 3 weeks of summery weather per year, great to sit in! It's a 3-bedroom place with two receptions (living rooms) and really is quite roomy. We're definitely still getting used to the place, and there are some unusual features: a very large number of mirrors, covering most of the closet and bathroom surfaces; elaborate bathtubs with jets that take several hours to fill because of the lack of water pressure; a tremendous capacity for storing shoes; numerous timers that control various outdoor and indoor lighting systems that have never been explained to us. The biggest issue has been a paint smell (the place was repainted and recarpeted before we arrived) that gave us both headaches the first night and seemed to keep Parker from sleeping; hopefully this won't last. In all, we like it and are looking forward to getting settled in.

Whether it was the paint smell, or more generally the new smells and sounds of being in a new place, our very first night here on Saturday was a bust. We'd spend the afternoon at my friend Joe Proctor's (American I knew from Moscow days who's been in London for years) and since he kindly lent us an air mattress we decided to spend the night at our new place, to which we had the keys and nearby but was pretty empty. We had places for the kids to sleep (tent for Sadie, borrowed cot for Parker)... but were missing two key objects: Parker's fuzzy giraffe that he sleeps with, and Karen's ipad, a source of his beloved "ranky tank" music. To make a long story short, the little guy refused to sleep, despite our vigrous efforts, and by 3am we declared defeat and called a cab for Karen & Parker to return to our temporary place. Second night here was also rough as we've put the two kids in the same room to sleep for the first time. But third night, just past, seems to have worked a bit better.