Thanksgiving weekend

I don't think it dawned on me that we wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving this year like we normally do until probably Wednesday evening, when I was thinking of how most of my friends back home would be heading home for a nice four day weekend with the family and I was just getting ready for another day of work. Oh well...I do get more vacation days now that I'm a UK employee, so I suppose if I had realized it earlier, we could have made our own Thanksgiving weekend. As it was, though, I've had a pretty busy week at work and we're looking forward to getting into our own place and having our own stuff arrive (rather than corporate housing with rented furniture), so we'll have a belated Thanksgiving dinner when we're in our own place.

Speaking of which, our housing search has been successful and we're in the final stages of getting a lease signed on a nice place in Chiswick. It is a converted flat on the ground floor of a Victorian terraced home that has access to a nice sized garden in the back yard. A realtor in the States would probably list it as "charming" (if you've read Freakonomics, you know what I mean by that). It has a lot of personality and we're excited to move in and get settled. I'm posting a few pictures below...

This is a picture of the front of the house:



Here's the garden, as viewed from the kitchen window:

This is the main reception area (don't worry, we're not keeping the white furniture...we know better with two children):

Here's the kitchen, which is a pretty good size compared with several other places we looked at.

Finally, the children have been learning their Articles of Faith in Primary this year, but we decided as a family that we wanted to learn them together as well. They have really impressed us with how quickly and how well they are able to memorize, and it has been helpful to have discussions about what the words mean as we learn each new one.

Enjoy!



(hopefully my experimentation with YouTube works...let me know if you can't see the videos)

Have we found a place to live?

Hey everyone (or...all three or four of you who read this blog),

Anne and the children arrived safely in the UK last Thursday evening. I was able to meet them at the airport and we took a cab back in to the city, where I had just checked in to a corporate apartment earlier that evening. We'll be staying there for about a month while we find a place to live and hopefully will have our stuff arrive in time for us to avoid having to pay for extra time or sleep on the floor!

We wasted no time in looking for a place and spent all day Friday out with an estate agent (British for "realtor") who took us to something like 15 different properties in one day. Luckily, we were able to find someone from church willing to watch the children even though they had only briefly met us back when we were here in August.

We think we found a few properties we liked, including one that we put an offer on today (Monday). It will likely be a few days before we hear back, so until then, we're going to keep looking.

We'll post pictures of the house once we have some firm idea whether or not we'll get the house so everyone can see. We actually saw the house twice, once with our estate agent and once again the next day with only the listing agent. We took the children back by the house to get their thoughts - they really liked it, and as luck would have it, there is another family from the ward who live right across the street, so they invited us over for lunch after we had seen the house. They have four children and are also from the States, so that would be fun to live that close to another family in the ward.

Isabelle and Chase were asked to participate in the Primary program yesterday. Chase backed out at the last minute, but he did stand and sing all the songs from his seat with us. Isabelle not only agreed to sit on the stand and help with the singing, but she was also given a part to read, which she did very well, especially considering she had never seen that particular part before.

Chase did something funny last night. I had some work to do and Anne was taking a nap to catch up on some jet lag and to try to get over the cold she's been fighting off for several days. While she was sleeping, I set the children up to call Deedee and Grandpa. While on the phone, they spoke to their Uncle Mark and Chase explained that he had a "cough due to a cold." Apparently, Mark was confused by this, and he asked Chase "What's a cough due to a cold?" whereupon Chase turned to me and asked "Daddy, what's a cough do to a cold?" When I told him I wasn't sure what he was talking about, he then told Mark "He doesn't know what a cough does to a cold...)

Anyway, funny story and thought it worth writing down...

Moving update

Anne & the kids arrive in London tomorrow! We're all pretty excited.

They've had a great time in NJ visiting friends and attending church where we lived from 1996 to 2003. It seems like such a long time since we've lived there and it is a bit hard to believe that both kids were born there, now that we've lived in three (and now four) other places since then.

They all went to the American Girl store and the Build-a-Bear workshop in NYC today. They also went to Toys-R-Us. Isabelle got a cat for her American Girl doll and Chase got a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and a "bad guy" to play with ("so they can fight each other").

Anne & the kids will get into London tomorrow evening and we'll move into a corporate apartment while (or "whilst" as they say here) we look for a place to live. We're supposed to meet with our relocation coordinator on Friday to go look at places in various neighborhoods that I've been scouting out over the past month or so during my weekends in London. We like Chiswick, Fulham, Hammersmith, and Clapham. There are some other places (St. John's Wood, South Kensington, Pimlico) where we'd love to live, but we'd also prefer to have a bit more space than a shoe box!

Here's one of the properties I liked, but it is pretty far from everything (way out in East Acton), so it might not work. Also turns out they have some pretty crummy schools in the neighborhood, despite how nice (and big for London!) the house is...

Wanted - new name for this blog

I'm now soliciting new names for this blog. We want to make this an "our" blog rather than a "my" blog, which means I'll have to come up with a better name than one that hearkens back to an old inside joke with some of my buddies in high school.

Any suggestions?