Day 20 Quebec

Celebrating a major coup last night.

Woke up at 5:15 feeling SO refreshed. Lachie slept through and was just beginning to stir. Amelia was waking each three hours during the night but at least the big brother was not. Yippee!

Lachie happily ate breakfast and then kept on grazing while I ate mine. He went with Tim to get breakfast bagels.

Soon after they returned, it was time for me to walk to church. It was cold, and drizzly, but not as cold as yesterday. The church had a large cloak room, which was a slightly different procedure; coats, hats, scarves, umbrellas off and hung up, then it was time to go through the door. Father was greeting people as they entered the church.  

It was a lovely building with a large carved wooden figure of Christ behind the altar, surrounded by organ pipes and gorgeous stain glass windows. The brilliant blue glass reminded me of Chartres Cathedral. St Patrick’s is the only English speaking Catholic church in Quebec. The current church was built in 1988 and incorporates furnishings, windows, artifacts of two previous churches, including a restored 1915 organ. There were a few differences to the service in Australia, but basically the same. I stayed behind after mass and took some photos of the interior. They have coffee after mass in a huge basement. I went down to join in and spent my time looking at photos and saved stain glass windows incorporated into the walls from previous buildings- possibly a boy’s and girl’s school?

After church I walked on down to the Metro supermarket for a few items, then onto the patisserie for bread and a croissant. There was a light mist, but you could see rain down in the valley. When I returned they were erecting the Christmas tree in the foyer. The apartment was empty. They had gone to the ships, so I put the clothes in the drier, swept and was washing the floors when the others returned. Both Lachie and Amelia were asleep.

Lunch time for adults, then Amelia woke up. Sarah went to bed while Amelia slept. While Lachie was asleep I typed up my diary and Tim was in the office. The afternoon was miserable outside. Dark, gloomy and wet. Lachie had been asleep for two hours when I woke him, then Tim took him to the undercover car park to ride his bike. Sarah had a good few hours of sleep. I did some hand sewing and then it was time for the dinner routine. Lachie ate all his dinner and was talking to Amelia on her play mat. “I be back when I eat my sausage” At least this time Amelia enjoyed part of her bath time, maybe she is slowly getting used to it?

After dinner and dishes it was time to sit down at the computer again. Now that Amelia has lost her “squashed birth face” she is looking more and more like Sarah as a baby.

Issues. I thought it was just last night and a card error/ the computer was too full. So I transferred a week’s worth of photos, but still had issues and ended up using the card reader on one card and the camera for the other. But tonight the card reader just would not work at all- dead. I was able to download from the Olympus via the camera, but the Nikon was problematic. Luckily Tim had an SD card reader in his computer and then we used a memory stick to transfer the photos. The next issue I have not managed to solve is that one camera is not recording sound! Important when filming children.