Wave a chicken in the air

Yesterday Mr Pickle and I took a whole chicken and cut it up into it's component meaty parts to freeze. He had a great time watching me disect it, whilst pointing out the various body parts to him.

After I had cleared away the mess and put the bones, skin and cast off bits into a pot to make stock, we set up the play doh on the dining table. Instead of making the usual worms, spaghetti and cut out shapes, Mr Pickle made a chicken carcass out of the doh and proceeded to cut off wings, legs and breast from the little shape with his plastic knife. I wish I had thought to take some photographs before he cut it up!

You may have noticed that I haven't talked about many other people other than just us. That is because we have not met many other people yet. We have spent most of our first week in the house amusing ourselves with lego, colouring pens, play doh, activity books and Dora the Explorer.

I have had three failed attempts, over the last couple of days, at visiting the local kindergarten. It appears that we have managed to coincide our arrival with half term here. This also means that the ex pat mothers have taken their ex pat children away to places, like Bali, for the break. Mr Pickle reached the point of desperation to play with children of his own age today.

Thankfully I had a sticker book and stickers in reserve for such an occasion. Apparently everyone should return from their holidays over the weekend, Mr Pickle will be able to enrol in kindy and make some friends to play with.

The challenge thrown at us today was to get the gas supply fixed. The failure of the hob to light this morning, to boil the kettle for a cup of tea, was a lovely surprise.

Jeremy was going off to a rig this morning for an overnighter so this kind of happenstance was expected on my part. Thankfully, Jeremy's company have a multitude of helpful people on the payroll who dutifully trooped through our house trying to fix the problem. As it turned out, it wasn't the regulator, as the house boy had thought (who had trecked to the shop to buy a new one before disappearing off to work), it was a blocked pipe. All sorted now. At 3pm I had my first cup of tea from the kettle.

While we had no hot water to shower, we scrubbed the bathrooms so that they are now shining and smell inviting. I flushed out a family of milipedes from one and enough hair in another to make a toupe. Nice.