Somewhere Over The Pond

Epilogue

2008-10-03T15:26:00.001Z

The driver's seat in my new Mommy Mobile has begun to mold satisfactorily to the shape of my ass.

What, not the update you were looking for from me after 9 weeks of silence? Because really, I think that one sentence tells you everything you need to know about my new life in the States. I am once again a suburban mom, hopping in and out of my SUV more times a day than I can count as I race from soccer practice to Target, from school drop off to coffee with a friend. Perhaps the fact that I'm still giving my daily routine this level of contemplation gives me away as not entirely comfortable here just yet. But I'm starting to get a little more settled, finding my groove simply by virtue of the fact of my presence here. The fit is coming -- in my life as well as in my car.

"How was London?" people ask me when they see me for the first time and I smile wistfully. "It was wonderful," I reply wholeheartedly. And then I sort of stop. Not just because I suspect that most people don't really want or need to hear anything more than that, but also because I'm not even sure quite what so say. It was wonderful, this I know. But I've lost the words (and perhaps even some of the memories already) to articulate how or why. When I think of London right now, the mental image is hazy, abstract, far away. It almost feels as if I had a wonderfully rich and detailed 2 year dream about living there. And now I've woken up, with that entire dream world just tantalizingly out of reach.

I'm apparently not the only one who feels that distance. Evan's English accent is very nearly gone. After a rough few weeks of transition, he tells me that school here is more fun than it was in England and he loves his new teachers the best of all. Yesterday, while building a block tower with him, I mentioned that our creation looked a lot like a castle that we'd seen in Spain. He paused. Squinted. Then shook his head. That memory has apparently evaporated already. My anglophile has fallen prey to the siren song of neighborhood bike riding and a dedicated play room in the basement. I have an American son again.

I have an American daughter, too. Julia speaks longingly about London with a frquency that surprises me a bit, reminiscing about her friends and the things they enjoyed doing together. But she seems willing enough to leave those happy memories in the past and is forging forward in her new life with gusto. I may be struggling with the educational gap that she's encountering here, but she's not struggling at all, in any way shape or form. Happy and confident and social and mature, she's as much at home in here as if we had never left.

For the 23 months that we lived in London, I felt like we were in the midst of a life altering experience. Yet here we are back in my New Jersey hometown, and our lives don't look all that different than they did before we left. That's both scary and soothing -- scary to have the most meaningful experience of our lives slip away so quickly and yet soothing to find that our transition back to American life has been easier than I'd envisioned. Some days I am filled with longing for all that I have left behind. But most days, it's frankly easier to leave it in the past. London bubbles up, to be sure. But as often as not these days, it's below the surface for all of us.

Will there be a lasting legacy of our London years, then, or will they just evaporate as our old life swallows us up again? I'm not really sure. I want to say that we're all enriched by the things that we saw and did and experienced, that the lessons of our time abroad will continue to impact the way we think and conduct ourselves for years to come. But it's kind of hard to believe that when I see how easily we've let ourselves get sucked back into our old world. I'm hoping that as time goes on and the day to day of our life here requires less immediate energy, we'll notice more and more of the subtle ways that London has influenced and changed us all. How and when that may happen remains to be seen.

Once upon a time, my family set out on an adventure. And then we came home. We were forever changed by our adventures and yet we were not changed at all. If we found ourselves while in London, it was only as the new improved people who we always were to begin with. And so life goes on seamlessly here on the other side of the pond. We giggle together and we argue at mealtimes and we run late to school and we snuggle close to read when the day is through, just as we did in England. We love London and we love our New Jersey hometown but more than anything, we love each other. Paul and I spent the past two years telling my children that wherever we are together as a family, that's home. At times I doubted this pat reassurance even as I spouted it. But now I know with absolute certainty that we were right all along. Perhaps that lesson is enough to have made the journey worthwhile in and of itself.

The End.

This will be my last blog post on Somewhere Over The Pond. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared in my family's adventures here over the past 2 years -- your comments and emails and support got me through many lonely days and made the happy days far more fun. I've been doing some writing as a contributing editor at Travel Savvy Mom and would welcome you to follow me there, both for my own posts and for those of the hysterical team of Mom travelers I'm lucky enough to work with there. I'm also hoping to pursue additional writing opportunities in the coming months, and will update with links here if and when I've got more to share (leads welcome!). In addition, my sotprebecca@gmail.com email address continues to work and I'm always happy to receive correspondence there. Please keep in touch!

An unintentional ode to my Ikea couch (that's one I never saw coming)

2008-07-29T09:46:00.003Z

I am curled up on the Ikea couch in my living room, drafting a blog post. There is nothing unusual about that; this couch (which turned out to be far more comfortable than I expected when we purchased it in our flurry of frenzied furnishing) has always been my favorite place to sit and write in this flat. At this point, it's also my only option. The removals team is here today packing up the contents of our flat and virtually everything we own here is boxed or wrapped already. It is only the fact that we have sold this couch to the next tenants of this flat which has kept it from the bubble-wrap-and-packing-tape fate of the items which surround it on all sides. This is moving day, the first of two on this end. (I don't care to contemplate the number of moving days we face on the other side of the pond just now.) There are, as Julia reminded me gleefully this morning just before she left for camp, only two more days before we board our plane for America.

If ever there was a moment for a reflective wrap-up post, I suppose this would be it. Watching our London life fit easily into a surprisingly small number of boxes and containers should be the kind of thing that would make me nostalgic and maudlin. Instead, I find myself a little numb, spent from the sorting and organizing and purging and pre-packing which has consumed the last week of my life and exhausted from the sleepless nights I've spent trying not to dwell on the ways our life will change in the coming months. I've done enough looking back. I'm not quite ready to look forward just yet. And so I'm just sitting here, grateful for the opportunity to rest for a bit, trying to write a blog post on the couch as if it were any other day of my life.

I think my real issue here is that writing a conclusion-type post about our London adventure feels like drawing a line in the sand, saying that it is over. In some ways, there is no avoiding the reality that it is over. Our things are gone and soon we will be, too. But the drive to see and explore and understand that which is foreign from our own experiences is not something that we can pack in a box or leave behind when we board a plane. The things that we've learned and seen and done here are a part of who we are now and the interests and habits we've developed here aren't going away just because we are. The friendships that we made in London can withstand the distance just as well as our American friendships have over the past several years. The travel bug can certainly come with us, too; planes fly in and out of the US every bit as frequently as they arrive and depart from Heathrow and Gatwick. Hopefully, the kids' accents will last, at least for a little while. We will still talk about and think about and write about London and the people and places we love here. "Leaving" does not need to mean "leaving behind." At least that's what I keep telling myself at 2am when I can't sleep for the enormity of our impending loss. London will be in us, long after we are not in London any more.

If it's not really over then, well, then there's not much to say, is there? Except that as I sit here typing so contentedly, I do feel the need to mention that I'm kind of going to miss this Ikea couch. This "oh, what the hell, just give me whatever you've actually got in stock, then" couch, bought on what might have been the most exhausting, stressful, overwhelming, "what the hell have we done here" day of this entire London experience, is pretty damn great. In fact, it might just be the only thing standing between me and a clean break here. I'm just now realizing how much I love this "oh, if we must" purchase. I can't believe I have to leave it behind. I'm really, really going to miss this couch.

You just never know what's going to resonate, do you? If ever there were a reason to keep on moving forward, spreading our wings and taking on whichever adventures and obstacles come our way, I think I just found it in the nice, comfy cushions of my (now) beloved Ikea couch. Closure is a beautiful thing, even when you still plan to leave the door ever so slightly ajar.

Folks in a town that was quite remote (heard)

2008-07-23T12:31:00.008Z

I spent much of our week in Austria singing the Lonely Goatherd song from The Sound of Music. This earworm might easily be explained by the fact that we began our Austrian adventure in Salzburg, a city which bears the dubious distinction of being the home of The Sound of Music. It might further be explained by the fact that this song was the encore for a fantastic Sound of Music marionette performance which we caught at one of the world's oldest marionette theatres while we were in town. Regardless of how the song got into my brain in the first place, once we left Salzburg and ventured into gorgeous Zell Am See, I kept gazing up at the unbelievable sights of the Austrian Alps and the only words that came to mind were "lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo." Oh, how my family must have loved having me around last week. (Oh, how much you must all be loving me right now.)

Don't you just see him there, the lonely goatherd, a little off to the left?

The Alps may have inspired me to yodel (What can I say? There were lots of things high on hills. One could easily have been a lonely goatherd...), but they also took my breath away. The resort town of Zell Am See, where we spent the majority of our Austrian holiday, was stunning; tremendous mountains, a crystal clear lake, and even -- due the the well-placed, though completely accidental timing of a summer festival one of the days that we were there -- folks in lederhosen and Bavarian dresses drinking copious amounts of beer long before the pretty bell tower had even struck noon. This was our kind of town.

We've been champions of the city break up until this point, pushing our children ahead through one urban landscape after another. This trip, our "interlude between lives" holiday, was nothing like our previous travels. After a quick visit to Salzburg, we spent the majority of our time at an all-inclusive "kinderhotel" in Zell Am See. We climbed a few mountains. We forded a few streams. But quite frankly, we spent the majority of our time with our asses plonked down on lounge chairs while our children ran and played with the other kids in the resort. It took us a few days to relax and unwind, but by the end of the week, I was starting to remember what a "vacation" truly feels like. We have traveled a lot in the past 2 years. But we haven't taken a single vacation. It turns out that I really like vacations. And my kids? They really seem to like vacations, too.

We returned to London rested, somewhat relaxed (What can I say? We're pretty tightly wound...) and just a bit detached from our lives here. As our minicab slipped through the streets of London, I found myself thinking what a good idea this trip had been and congratulating myself for a such well planned, strategically placed vacation. And then we got back into our flat and dropped our bags on the floor and Paul heaved an enormous sigh of relief. "It's not your fault, because you didn't know how it would all feel," he told me. "But we're not ever traveling so close to an impending move ever again. That was an impossible situation."

Huh. So, uh, I take it all back. Perhaps we weren't all so rested and relaxed after all. Except... I kind of think we were.

King of the mountain

But wait -- there's more

2008-07-13T10:23:00.003Z

Thanks to all of you who commented or sent emails or called me about this week's photo slide show... seems it was a fitting way to wrap up an amazing two years abroad. Don't go waving us out the door just yet, however, because we still have 2 and a half weeks of nearly non-stop action, including just one more European adventure, ahead of us before we call it quits and head stateside.

If it feels a bit disjointed have watched a departure-themed retrospective only to now read about our plans for another vacation and upcoming swimming lessons and playdates and camp here in London, well, welcome to the confusing schedule of events and emotions that is my July. The kids' last day of school was last Thursday and with it came a flurry of goodbyes and the end of our regular "life as we know it" routine in London. It was an emotional week, full of busy schedules and sad farewells and way, way too much sugar. With all of that now behind us, I feel very much as if our time here has reached its natural conclusion. It's time to go. And yet due to Paul's work schedule we really can't leave for good until the end of the month, so here we still are.

People tend to get out of London pretty quickly when the school term wraps up, and a lot of the people we care about are already gone or departing momentarily. We knew this would happen and so we booked one last trip to forestall the melancholy emptiness I knew that we'd feel once we had said our goodbyes. It was a good idea... in theory. But packing for vacation when we're also packing for the US is bizarre and looking forward to the week and a half that will be left when we get back here is even odder. It's hard to know what to look forward to and what to mourn and what to think and what to pack. It's harder still to know how to feel.

Several hours from now, we will be in Austria, climbing every mountain and fording every stream and hemming and hawing bizarrely when people ask us where we're from. This will either turn out be the best way we could have spent this week or money down the drain, but the trip is booked and so off we go. Tune in a week from now to hear about Salzburg and Zell Am See. For now, to London we say so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen... but not quite yet goodbye.

In lieu of 1,000 words

2008-07-08T16:17:00.003Z

English

2008-06-30T08:50:00.005Z

Evan and I were sitting on a bus stop bench last week, talking -- as we often do these days -- about our impending move to the States.

"When we get to New Jersey, you and Daddy and Julia are going to have to show me everything," Evan reminded me for perhaps the eight dozenth time. His face was sweetly anxious, his high pitched voice decidedly British in its apprehension.

I wrapped my arm tightly around him and pulled him closer to my side. "We will, don't worry," I assured him, just as I've done so many other times in the past several weeks. "There are lots of wonderful things about New Jersey that you're going to love, and we're all really looking forward to sharing them with you."

Evan nodded solemnly. He'd heard this many times before and had clearly just wanted me to say it again. But this time, a new concern had occurred to him. "And if people there don't speak English, what will I say?" he asked as the worried look spread back across his features.

I tried to turn my amused smile into one of reassurance. "Oh, don't worry honey," I replied as gently as I could. "They speak English in America." The older English woman who was sitting beside Evan on the bench let out a snort. "Of a sort," she remarked dryly.

Evan looked confused. I automatically laughed, wondering guiltily as I did so whether I was being disloyal to my American roots in my amusement or whether my reaction was actually more American than anything else. And then we climbed about the big red bus and rode off up the left hand side of the street, Evan musing silently about the puzzling cipher that is America and me about the one that is England.

Brighton beach memoirs

2008-06-23T08:39:00.007Z

There was a time when Paul and I went to Nantucket every summer with a group of friends. We would rent a big house for a week and putter around, spending our days on the beach or cycling around town and our evening gathered together over elaborate meals that everyone had pitched in to help prepare. We started making the trip pre-kids, then there was that memorable summer when we all waddled around town with burgeoning bellies and then in the 2 years that followed, you were as likely to find empty baby bottles on the table as you were to find empty wine bottles when you wandered downstairs in the morning.

Our Nantucket days were wonderful and I still think of them fondly, but we knew it was time to stop making the trip once the children were all a few years old. Nantucket was great for the adults, but kids, we realized, need kid-friendly vacations -- rental houses that don't have breakable tchotchkies and local restaurants that welcome children and maybe some mini golf and a boardwalk to keep them entertained.

I remember feeling strongly that family vacations needed to be geared toward the kids, remember arguing this point vehemently during a late evening debate on the subject on one of our last Nantucket nights. We have the rest of our lives to go to Nantucket, I insisted. But first, we have an obligation to give our kids proper childhood memories in the kinds of borderline tacky environs that children adore. The following year -- and the year after that -- we talked wistfully of Nantucket and then we loaded up the car with buckets and tricycles and headed off to the kid-paradise that is the Jersey Shore, confident that we were doing the right thing for our children.

All that lofty catering-to-the-children nonsense went out the window when we moved here, of course. We traded vacations built on boardwalks and ice cream stands for holidays filled with castles and cathedrals, shouting "once in a lifetime" over and over again as we dragged our children to see all that Europe has to offer. Along the way, as it became clear that I had severely underestimated my kids' ability to enjoy attractions and activities which are not expressly kid-focused, I started to think that maybe I had overestimated the importance of the child friendly vacation destination.

It turns out I hadn't.

We took the kids on a day trip to Brighton this weekend. Just an hour south of London by train, Brighton is perhaps the English equivalent of the Jersey Shore. It is broad expanses of beach fringed by an endless stream of souvenir shops and Fish and Chip stands. It is a giant pier with funfair and amusement arcades. It is families with small children begging for one more ice cream, young adults hanging around the beach during the day and crowding into the local nightclubs when night falls. It is flashing lights and win a prize here and please-can-I-have-some more-ride-tokens-Daddy. I had completely forgotten how much kids like places like this.

All told, we maybe spent a grand total of about 5 or 6 hours in Brighton. In that time, the kids hunted for shells on the rocky beach and collected giant piles of smelly seaweed for reasons known only to them. They dropped 10p coins into the kiddie version of a slot machine and gorged themselves on candy floss (otherwise known as cotton candy). They gleefully rode a 2-seater merry go round and giggled endlessly as they rammed their Dodgems cars (bumper cars, natch) into each other. Evan rode a kiddie coaster. Julia had her first log flume ride. And then they universally declared our handful of hours in Brighton the best trip we've ever taken. Four days in Paris? Meh. A little under a week in Barcelona? Just fine. But Brighton, they insisted joyously, was the best place EVER.

Paris wasn't meh, of course. My kids loved Paris. Ditto Barcelona and Stockholm and Edinburgh and Rome and... must I type out the whole extensive list? I totally underestimated my children that night in Nantucket when I made that broad sweeping blame-it-on-that-extra-glass-of-wine proclamation that you must take kids to kid-focused destinations in order to have a good family vacation. But watching them delight in Brighton this weekend, I realized that I hadn't been all wrong about those child-magnet places, either.

I'll never forget or regret any of the trips we've taken here. But I'm looking forward to next summer and the promise of some time spent "down the Shore" all the same. We've given our kids endless European memories and now I want to give them some of those proper childhood memories in borderline tacky environs. Not because it's our only vacation option or because it's our "obligation" as I believed a few short years ago. Just because it's fun.

Calculating

2008-06-16T08:06:00.002Z

The scene: Julia is on a Skype teleconference with her grandparents, catching up on the events of the week.

Grandma: So Julia, what did you do in school this week?

Julia: A lot of math. We're adding numbers in columns by tens and units. Oh, and I know my 2s time table up to TEN!

Grandma: Wow... that's great!

Grandpa: What's 2 x 8?

Julia: 18

Grandpa: Close, but not exactly. Want to try again?

There is a short pause, during which we all presume that Julia is re-calculating to make sure her next answer will be correct. This turns out to be exactly what she is doing, but not at all in the way we had anticipated.

Julia: I know my 2s times table up to SEVEN!

She may have a way to go where rote memorization of math facts is concerned, but something tells me that when she gets to the problem solving section of the math curriculum, the kid's going to do just fine...

So you're thinking of traveling with your small children in tow

2008-06-11T08:40:00.003Z

The first time I took my kids (then aged 3 and 1) to visit their grandmother in Arizona, I actually shipped an entire case of soy milk to her house a week before we left. Mind you, neither of my kids are actually lactose intolerant. They just preferred soy milk at that age -- a specific brand of soy milk -- and I wasn't taking any chances that anyone would not have their preferred beverage and therefore not get enough hydration and therefore not be on their best behavior and therefore make the entire week a living hell for everyone.

Needless to say, I've loosened up just a bit in the past few years.

I don't pre-ship soy milk any more. I don't even bother to buy fun surprises to pack in the kids' backpacks so that they'll be entertained on the airplane. (Here, kid, have a barf bag. Make it into a puppet or something. We'll be there in about an hour.) But I do continue to very carefully plan ahead to make sure that our trips will be successful, and this planning has paid off in the form of quite a few fabulous trips in the past few years. So for those of you about to embark on your own adventures with children, as well as for the armchair travelers out there living vicariously right now, I humbly offer the single most important thing that I have learned about planning vacations for our young family:

Where you stay is far more important than where you go.

When traveling with small children, a hotel room is not just a place where you lay your head. It's also the place you escape to when your kids are just too wound up or worn down to do any more sightseeing. It's the place you'll need to entertain said children when they awaken at bizarre hours because of the time change and the place you'll need to keep yourselves entertained after you tuck your little travelers into bed at a decent hour. Staying too far away from the action is a mistake when you're dragging kids back and forth to the city center, but staying in the "best hotel" in the heart of it all can be just as fatal if that hotel is too attached to its breakable accessories and starched white tablecloths. Grunge is bad. Glam is equally bad. And a concierge and wait staff who don't much care for children are the kiss of death.

This may sound ridiculous to non-parents, but I suspect that anyone with young children will understand and appreciate my wisdom here when I confess that I have booked entire holidays in locations I hadn't even previously considered visiting simply because I stumbled across great family-friendly acommodations there. Slight overkill? Perhaps. But the world is a big place and there are wonderful things to explore and discover in nearly any locale. There aren't always good places for families to stay. You do the math.

So where are these great acommodations? They're out there, I promise! We've personally found short-term holiday apartments to be preferable to regular hotels in many European cities, but we've also had luck with aparthotels, suite hotels and hotels which offer "family room" setups on occasion. The key to finding the best properties is inevitably word of mouth. If you have friends who travel, they can be a great resource, but I often find Internet reviews to be an equally reliable source.

I've recently been doing a bit of writing for Travel Savvy Mom, a new site designed to be a resource for family-friendly acommodations worldwide. My obviously biased opinion is that this is a great place to start when looking for acommodations; the property reviews are not only very funny, they're also honest and real and exceedingly helpful. The site is still in its infancy, though, so if you're not looking to stay in a treehouse in Oregon or a children's castle in Tokyo, you may temporarily have to look further for a good recommendation.

TripAdvisor is the best of the major hotel review sites in this instance; several of them let you specifically filter family-friendly properties when searching their list of reviews, but TripAdvisor seems to get it right the most frequently. Kid-specific travel sites like Travel For Kids, Take The Family and Baby Goes 2 will often turn up some good suggestions. Occasionally, I'll hit the jackpot simply typing something like "family friendly hotel London" into a search engine. And then I cross-reference. One positive review could be a fluke. A couple of different ones on different sites are a good sign.

No matter how good the reviews elsewhere, however, I always go directly to the property's website for a quick look around before I make a booking. You can learn a lot about a place simply from the tone of its marketing materials. I don't need 6 pages of description about the ways that they cater to children or a big furry mascot who will make our stay "non-stop fun for the little ones." But if soft violin music accompanies a montage of couples-only photographs and seven different "romance package" offerings, I get a bit suspicious about how welcome my children will actually be upon our arrival. At a minimum, I want to see the word "families" appear a few times in the web copy. If they don't want us enough to market to us, we probably don't want them either.

"Your children have been so well behaved that it's been a pleasure to have them," a B&B owner once told us when we checked out of her lovely property in the English countryside. We had selected the place in large part because it was advertised as family-friendly, so her next sentence threw us a bit. "If all kids were like yours, we'd actually want to have them stay here." We pretended not to notice this odd slip, thanked her politely and ushered the kids quickly out of the house before someone screamed or touched something or otherwise blew our well-behaved cover. And then in the car on the way out, I carefully drew a black line through the words "family friendly" in our library-borrowed guidebook. If you recently checked that book out of London's Swiss Cottage library, you're welcome.

Up, up and away

2008-06-06T08:25:00.005Z

There's a new display up on the main bulletin board at the entrance to Evan's school this week, a travel-themed project put together by his class. Each child created and decorated a paper mache hot air balloon and a little woven paper basket to go beneath it. A small stuffed bear (selected because his class is called the Bears, of course) sits in each basket, alongside a cloud which says where the bear is headed.

Darling, no? This is a classic example of the cute, creative art projects his teachers dream up; just one of about a gazillion things I'll miss about this school next year. The display was adorable and probably enough, given my current fragile state, to make me prematurely nostalgic in and of itself. But it was what Evan had chosen to write on his cloud that actually made me suspiciously misty eyed:

Damn straight, kiddo. But perhaps the journey would be a bit less onerous if we just took a plane?

The loaves and the fishes

2008-06-04T15:08:00.003Z

"Hey, Evan, want to know another great thing about New Jersey? In your New Jersey school, you'll get to celebrate Shabbat every Friday. Sometimes I'll even get to be the Shabbat Mom, which means I'll bring your favorite book and snack in to share with the class and then we'll all go to the sanctuary to sing songs and say prayers and eat challah and celebrate Shabbat together."

"Wow, really? That's great... Friday's already my favorite day because of the fish!"

"The fish?"

"Yeah... fish on Fridays. Fish and chips and challah on the same day will be great!"

Paul and Julia and I may be moving home, but I am beginning to suspect that Evan is going to find himself in a foreign country come August...

Wanderlost

2008-06-01T16:27:00.004Z

The weary travelers have returned again, this time from Spain, where we have just spent the week of our final school Half Term break of the year exploring Segovia, Madrid and Toledo. (Oh my God, did I honestly just say the weary travelers have returned? I've written so many of these trip recaps by now that I'm resorting to overused cliches. But if ever an overused cliche has summed our experience up so succinctly that it just screamed to be used, it is that of the weary traveler right now. Because people, we. are. weary.)

I personally am so weary that I hardly have the energy to give this trip the enthusiastic review that it surely deserves. It was, after all, a great vacation when viewed in isolation. We loved Segovia, liked Toledo and tolerated Madrid. We visited the most amazing castle we've seen in all of Europe, enjoyed some stupendous scenery and took great pride in our horrendously abysmal attempts to sound like locals. We stayed in just the right places, ate in many of the right places, visited as many of the right places as we could realistically pull off with the kids in tow. We enjoyed it all. It was a well planned trip. It ought to have been -- I've planned over a dozen like it in the past two years.

OK, gang, you know the drill... smile like maniacs while some stranger snaps our photo.

And that's my problem, I think. I viewed this trip not in isolation but in the context of the dozen-or-so trips that came before it, and from that vantage point it was all a little but unsettlingly ho hum. In the face of all of those pack-it-up-and-move-it-out adventures stacked one on top of the other, my wanderlust is beginning to make way for something else, stability-lust, maybe. I'm beginning to think that in our haste to see and do it all before our time here is up that we've seen and done too many things, to the point that our travels have begun to lose some of their lustre and charm. This was yet another good trip for us. We've got this travel business down to a science. And that, I think, is kind of sad. Because travel should take you out of your ordinary and give you experiences that you would never get to enjoy in your regular day to day life. When it becomes the ordinary and the day to day, an essential piece of what makes travel so exciting disappears.

Do I sound like a spoiled brat here? Oh poor me, I've just dragged my kids to too many fabulous places in the past two years. That's not it, of course. I'm incredibly grateful for this opportunity and well aware of how fortunate I am to find myself among the cliched travel weary of the world. But I'm also grateful that our jet setting days are drawing to a close this summer. As hard as it will be to say goodbye to our life here, I'm ready to say goodbye to this lifestyle. I'm ready for roots and routine and a same-old-same-old that's supposed to be a same-old-same-old. I ache for a calendar filled with soccer practices and playdates rather than one which reads like the index of a Lonely Planet guide. I look forward to settling into real life again, to unpacking the layers of tissue that protect my old familiar things and dusting off my old notions of normalcy. And maybe it's too much to ask for, but I'm hoping that I might just find my wanderlust there again too.

Time keeps on slipping (slipping, slipping) into the future

2008-05-21T10:20:00.004Z

The first removals company came yesterday to quote the job of shipping our belongings back to the States. Hours earlier, I had called our landlord to let him know that we are leaving and to recommend friends of ours as the next occupants of this flat. Taking care of these simple routine details has consumed me a bit more than I had anticipated. All that I can think about these days is our impending departure.

Our London life can be counted down in weeks now -- 10 1/2 more, to be exact. On August 1, we will be on a plane back to New Jersey and our time here will be nothing but a memory. Already, it has begun to feel like a memory, like we are living moments that I can fondly recall before they have even had a chance to occur. I'm ten steps ahead of myself it seems, because in my mind's eye we are already strapped into our seats as the plane hurtles down the runway, pointed towards home and away from home all at the same time.

"Slow down," I want to beg the clock, the calendar, the people around me. "Slow down," I want to tell myself as my brain launches into overdrive planning yet again. Slow down. Let me enjoy this. It's not over yet.

But there is no slowing down. I try to stop, to savor the moment, to really look at our current life and to enjoy what remains of it. But even that effort betrays me; if I open my eyes, I'm forced to see how quickly this has become this:

Any day now it seems, those new leaves will already be changing color and tumbling to the ground, blanketing the path of someone else's daily routine. It won't be mine. Our time in London will be over then, just as it now seems to be over even before it has actually come to an end. We're still here and yet we're already on that airplane, too. Fasten your seatbelts, folks. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

The look of friendship

2008-05-18T10:43:00.003Z

A good friend and I have an expression that we often use when talking about new acquaintances whom we've hit it off with: "she looked like me." This description has nothing to do with a person's physical appearance and everything to do with who she is inside. A person can look like me in philosophy or parenting style even if on the surface we look entirely different. A person can look like me in her wardrobe choices or her preferred reading material, her sense of humor or her passion for chocolate. Sometimes it's entirely intangible and undefinable why a person looks like me. But I know it when I see it, and those are the people I seek out as friends.

When we made the decision to move to London for a few years, I worried a lot about whether I would find anyone who looked like me here. I'm the kind of person who needs other people around me to be happy, and I don't tend to do a very good job of faking it with people for whom I don't feel a natural affinity. If I couldn't find anyone who looked like me in London, if I couldn't find anyone who I could be real with, I knew that these would be two very long, very lonely years.

I worked hard at making friendships when we arrived in London. Sometimes I could spot the ways in which the people I met looked like me easily (the other ex-PR mavens from New York were a slam dunk), but I also saw reflections of myself in the Swedish mother who thought about parenting almost as hard as I did, in the English woman who refused to wear stylish, uncomfortable shoes when she was just going to pick up her son at school and in the Israeli neighbor who knows that a quick cup of coffee or glass of wine with a friend can make any day infinitely better. I have also met plenty of wonderful people here who don't look a blessed thing like me here, however, and I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that it's been possible to form great friendships with a lot of them even without that initial click.

Last night, Paul and I went on a London Walks Hampstead Pub Walk with a big group -- mostly friends, with a few friends-of-friends sprinkled into the mix. For every person who looked like me on that tour there was one who doesn't, but it was a congenial, well matched group all the same. We all had a great time getting to know the area that we call home a bit better, and along the route we traded our own stories and observations along with the guide's official patter. As we stopped in front of a local theatre toward the end of the evening, I commented that Paul and I had once seen a singularly unimpressive production there. "I desperately wanted to re-write the whole damn play," I said as I described why it hadn't worked for us. "What else is new?" a friend standing next to me replied wryly, and everyone within earshot started to laugh.

I threw an arm around my accuser, laughing along with the group. Two years later, there's no question that the friends I've made here know me well. They know that I'm blunt and often forthright, they know that I'm obsessive at times and they obviously know that I have a bit of a bug up my butt where good writing is concerned. They may not look like me, but they're willing to look at me and they like what they see. And that, I now realize, is far more important in the making of a friendship than the similarities ever were.

One man's trash...

2008-05-13T13:07:00.003Z

Score! Found at the Hampstead Women's Club Nearly New Sale this past weekend (price: 75p):

I am fairly certain that I am the only person in ~~Hampstead~~ ~~London~~ ~~the UK~~ the known free world who would consider this a treasure.

Do you haiku?

2008-05-08T08:45:00.002Z

My last few posts have been far too verbose, even by my standards. And so today, I offer you a succinct little 17-syllable summary of our overseas experience.

Expat existence:
Marvel at our foreign life
Then go clean your room

Last call for booking enquiries

2008-05-07T09:41:00.004Z

I'm busy readying the house today in anticipation of our 28th American visitor, who will be arriving tomorrow morning for a weekend stay. My friend Kari is leaving her children (including a beautiful new 4 1/2 month old daughter) in her husband's capable hands and escaping to London for a weekend of girl talk and sightseeing, and I could not be more excited about her impending arrival. Her visit will be the highlight of my May, just as my parents claimed that honor for April, close family friends for both March and January, one of Julia's best friends for December... the list goes on and on.

I suppose that the fact that we've had so many visitors here speaks as much to the appeal of our current location as to the allure of our company. If we lived in Podunk, USA and people came to visit in droves, now that would be a testament to our friendships and our great charm as hosts, but London's a slightly easier pull. With the price of hotels and the exchange rate being what they are, who wouldn't want to take advantage of free lodging in one of the world's most amazing cities?

Nonetheless, I can't help but feel incredibly touched that so many people have made the transatlantic trip to see us in the past two years. This will be the 15th time in 20 months that I've stocked the fridge and prepared guest linens and laid out extra towels, and each time it's given me a thrill to know that the relationships we hold dear have stood the tests of distance and time. Kari's not the first person to leave a baby behind to come see us. Others have even brought their kids (if voluntarily flying across an ocean with small children for a visit isn't a sign of love, I don't know what is). A few hardy souls have actually come back to see us a second (or even third) time. Each time, our guests are our whole world for as long as they are here, and the warm glow of familiarity and cameraderie that their presence brings to our London home lasts long after they've left.

I will do the Buckingham Palace/Trafalgar Square/Big Ben and Parliament/London Eye loop for about the eighty-fifth time this weekend. I will make yet another trip to Kensington Palace and I'll point out the highlights of my neighborhood for the gazillionth time. We will visit a classic English pub for a pint, a classic English park for the pictures, a classic English tchotchkie shop for the requisite souvenirs. I've got the tourist shtick down pat by now and I'd be lying if I said it still holds the same "wow factor" for me that it did two years ago. I could very nearly give the full Thames boat ride spiel myself. I'm kind of over Diana's dresses. I still don't much care for warm beer. And yet, somehow it's still fun every time.

It was great to see my father in law's delight at the sight of cars with steering wheels on the right. It's been fabulous to watch Julia and Evan show "their" London to other American kids. It was exciting to host our friends who are Giants fans for a game played on London soil. It's been lovely to welcome back people who've come to feel a bit at home here themselves. And most of all, it has been unbelievably important and wonderful for us to discover over and over again that despite the fact that we up and left everyone we cared about to move here, our American relationships remain strong and true and real. The whistle stop tour of London may be getting old, but our guests provide all the "wow factor" we need.

I'm hardly a natural hostess and this is not a huge flat. Our lives and routines are thrown out of whack every time someone turns up on our doorstep. And yet surprisingly, that's been just fine with me. I'm going to miss these intense stints of sharing time, adventures, and tight living space with the people we love. I'm even going to miss the extra meal planning and the schedule juggling and the tour guide routine intrinsic in each house guest's visit. Kari's the last scheduled guest on our calendar, but we've still got a few months left here in London and fares are pretty low right now. The sleeper sofa still has some life to it and there's some more money left on the extra mobile phone and Oyster cards we keep ready for guests. Anyone else want to see Big Ben?

From the diary of a not-so-young girl

2008-05-01T10:30:00.008Z

I must have read Anne Frank's diary about a thousand times as a child. We were both Jewish girls who dreamed of writing, and in my youthful mind, that made us kindred spirits. Never mind that she faced persecution and eventual death while I enjoyed the privileged of a suburban middle class upbringing; if anything, I thought that I envied Anne her dramatic story and the writing material she was able to extract from her situation. (I may have been lacking in first person experience, but I clearly had the melodrama thing down pat...)

Last weekend, Paul and I took advantage of a visit from my parents and left the kids in their capable hands while we headed off for a weekend trip to Amsterdam. The top item on my "must do" list, unsurprisingly, was a trip to the Anne Frank House.

We followed our guidebook's advice and arrived at the museum late in the day to try to avoid the worst of the queues, but we still had about a 15-20 minute wait before we entered the building. As I looked up and down the peaceful, tree lined street, I kept trying to see it as Anne's last sight when she entered hiding and her first one two years later as she emerged in the custody of the Nazis. I couldn't wrap my mind around any of it. Intellectually, I understood what had happened in the spot where I was standing, but I found myself unable to connect any emotion to that awareness at all.

Numbly, I entered the building and numbly I walked through the exhibits. I studied the model of the annex from above, listened to the recorded interviews with those who remembered Anne and her family after the war and viewed the artifacts on display. "This is the bookshelf I read about so many times," I told myself as I entered the stairwell. "These are the walls the family stared at, this is the attic where Anne and Peter escaped to be alone. This is what I read so much about, imagined in my mind so many times. This is it." They were just words, though, and these were just rooms. None of it was sinking in.

I walked slowly through the annex, careful not to miss anything, as I waited to feel... something. It didn't seem to be happening. After years of imagining a connection based on a book, I felt no connection whatsoever as I finally stood in its setting. This was a museum, carefully staged to convey meaning and evoke emotion. But all of that careful cultivation wasn't working for me. Here in the house where she had lived and written, I could no longer identify with or even recognize the young girl who had captivated me so much in print.

Resigned to a museum experience but determined to make the most of it, I continued on to a room which featured a recording of Otto Frank talking about what it had been like to first read his daughter's diary after the war. He described his surprise at the thoughts and reflections expressed within the pages, so different and so much deeper than the ideas Anne had shared with him in person during their time in hiding. He had thought they had talked about anything and everything, he said, and yet here was so much more to his daughter than had ever met his eye. "From this I can only determine," he said, his face carefully composed around his grief, "that as parents we can never truly know our children at all."

I thought of my own children, of the ways in which they are still transparent and of the complicated layers underneath their surfaces which I am beginning to sense and unable to penetrate. I pictured how completely I had known them in their infancy and how much less I seem to know them with each passing day. I reflected on the odd mixture of wistfulness and pride their blossoming independence sparks in me. I contemplated the experience of watching your child's shoulders hunched over in concentration as she secrets her innermost thoughts away day after day. I thought about what has to go so terribly wrong before you are privy to those reflections. And then -- finally -- I felt my heart break open into a thousand pieces.

At 10, it was Anne Frank with whom I felt an imagined kinship. Twenty five years later, it is her father with whom I identify the most. Anne is frozen in time as a teenager, but I am not, and I should have realized that time would change me and my perspective. What time hasn't changed is the impact this one family's story has on me. I walked out of that house wanting to go back and re-read the Diary for the first time in many years. But as I look at my children and reflect on my obligation to protect them, I wonder if I could even make it through the book now, reading it -- as I surely would -- through Otto Frank's eyes.

Just when I thought I was beyond the challenges of the American/English divide

2008-04-29T18:14:00.004Z

This was the first week that Julia has not come home with a Super Speller sticker affixed to her school jumper on a Monday afternoon.

The Super Speller stickers are a great example of the English practice of expecting serious academic work from seriously young kids. Julia comes home from school every Tuesday with her list of spelling words for the week. She and her classmates copy down the week's 10 words (often made up of suggestions from the class or taken from a book they are currently reading) and after the teacher has checked their lists for accuracy, they have just under a week to learn the words before their regular Monday spelling test. And then, because they're 6, they get a pretty sticker if they get all of the words right on their tests.

In typical "it's hard to believe we share any genes at all" fashion, Julia adores the very concept of spelling tests and works hard to master her words. Up until this past week, she was one of only two children in the class who had never gotten a word wrong. Trust me to ruin her perfect streak.

There were a couple of particularly hard words on last week's list and a few of them looked to have been fixed when Julia's teacher had checked her list before sending it home. One word still looked wrong, however, and the proliferation of eraser marks and odd letters in and around the word led me to wonder how closely her teacher had looked at Julia's corrections. "In America, this word is spelled with an O that you don't have here," I told her the first time that she showed me her words for the week. "I suppose it's possible that the British spelling of marvelous doesn't have an O in it, but I'd be awfully surprised. You should really check with your teacher."

Julia being Julia, she didn't want to approach her teacher with the question, but she did assure me that she'd checked with her friends and there was definitely an O in marvelous here, too. And so she altered the spelling accordingly, I quizzed her on her words as always, and she went into school on Monday confident in her spelling skills. She did a marvelous job of spelling her words exactly as I had taught her. And that turned out to be her crucial error.

Marvelous, I am now fully aware, does have an O on both sides of the pond. It also (who knew?) has an extra L over here. (Remember all those odd letters in and around the word? Perhaps they were meant to be there after all...) Marvellous. Julia's American spelling did not pass muster in her English classroom this week and I have just officially flunked Year One Spelling. I think I owe my daughter a sticker.

Seen one bridge? Seen 'em all? (I'm not quite sure, really.)

2008-04-22T13:39:00.012Z

We pride ourselves in being fairly seasoned in the use of foreign public transportation at this point. We’ve ridden busses in

Sweden

, trams in the Cech Republic, trains in

Belgium

, subways in

Spain

… the list goes on and on. Each place has its little idiosyncrasies of course (would it kill the Italians to mention that you have to validate train tickets in those little yellow boxes on the platforms?), but in general, we’ve got the transport thing under control. So when we arrived in the Venice train station loaded down with luggage and tired kids who had not yet had their daily gelato fix, we weren’t too concerned. Paul purchased our vaporetto passes and we were ready to be on our way.

“We need the 2,” he told me squinting at the route map. Looking up, we easily spotted a “2” sign. We were in luck; the boat appeared to be there waiting for us. “Come on kids,” we yelled, grabbing armloads of suitcases and backpacks and breaking into a run. “Wait, wait, no wait,” Paul called to me moments later as I charged down the gangplank. “This one’s going the wrong way.” We re-traced our steps as he studied the signs again. “Do we want that one?” I asked hopefully, pointing off to our right. “Cause it looks like there’s a boat waiting there, too.” Sure enough, that appeared to be our route, and so again we charged, racing to get aboard. “Get seats near the window,” we urged the kids. “Look out at Venice.” And so they did and so we did. They sat and we looked as we bobbed up and down on the big square yellow boat. One minute we sat. Two minutes we sat. The view did not change. The boat did not move. “When do you think we’re going to leave?” the kids finally asked. “I think,” I replied slowly as I surveyed our surroundings more carefully, “that we’re not leaving ever, at least not until we board an actual boat.” We had raced, it turned out, to catch a loading dock.

After that auspicious start, is it any wonder that I felt lost the entire time that we were in Venice?

Venice is without a doubt the most disorienting city I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s all narrow passageways and little bridges and signs that shed absolutely no light on your whereabouts.

Perhaps signs like this are funnier if you have any sense of direction whatsoever? I wouldn't really know.

Bringing kids to Venice, contrary to the “expert” advice, is absolutely no problem; the back alleys and wide canals provide a rich wealth of sights and discoveries for an enthusiastic child. Bringing a geographically challenged adult to Venice, on the other hand, is probably not such a wise idea. I wandered around Venice for 3 days in a constant state of confusion and disorientation. I've never seen lovelier vistas or more charming views, but damned if I could tell one from another. “OK, so we’ve definitely been here before,” I would announce confidently every time we came to a bridge or stepped into a square. I was wrong every time.

Before long, even my kids were laughing at me. (I can only hope that this means they inherited their father's navigational skills rather than mine.) So I left the navigating to Paul and concentrated on taking my photographs. If worse came to worse, I figured, perhaps I could scroll back through my memory card and use the images as digital breadcrumbs to lead us home. Trust me when I tell you I did some serious weeding out before I posted the Venice photos on Flickr.

Did I adore Venice as much as I'd expected? Meh. I was too disoriented by Venice to truly say that I loved the city. There were a lot of tourists and a lot of mediocre restaurants, and that's generally not a winning combination for me, particularly just coming off the high of our Florence adventure. Nonetheless, Venice is a simply beautiful and incredibly unique place and I'm not just trying for the easy, trite blog wrap-up when I say that I'm so glad to have had a chance to seen it for myself. (At least... I think I saw Venice. It's also entirely possible that I just saw one bridge over and over again from different angles. If so, let me tell you, it was one heck of a bridge.)

OK, kids... say "Mommy's lost again!"

Il mio cuore appartiene a Firenze

2008-04-16T09:56:00.009Z

For the past two years, we've carefully planned our travels with our children's limitations (or at least what we perceived to be their limitations) in minds. Short trips. Single destinations that have plenty of indoor and outdoor activity options within easy reach. Apartments rather than hotels wherever possible so that we can all spread out a bit. Minimal amounts of packing up and moving on.

These guidelines have made for many a successful holiday for us. The formula wasn't really working when I sat down to plan our April trip to Italy, however, and so I had reluctantly booked a different kind of vacation -- a night in Pisa, two nights in Florence and 3 nights in Venice. Our itinerary involved flying in and out of different airports, two significant train journeys, two different hotels and an apartment. We would be on the go, rushing to pack and catch some form of transportation roughly every two days. To say I was nervous about how it was going to all work out would be an understatement.

It worked beautifully. (In fact, it worked so beautifully that Paul and the kids kept asking me why we don't always travel this way. Go figure.)

Despite the fact that the kids were really excited to see the Leaning Tower (the Wonder Pets and the Little Einsteins have been there so it must be great, they figured), even Julia announced after we'd taken the requisite dozen photographs of ourselves holding up the tower that she was pretty much "done with Pisa." We agreed; it's a cute town and we're glad we saw it, but half a day was enough. Fortunately, half a day was all we had, and we set off for Florence the next morning.

Children unclear on the concept: "Does it look like we're holding the tower up now?"

We made our way to the Duomo that first afternoon in Florence and after admiring the gingerbread house-like effect of the massive structure's white, green and pink marble exterior, we went inside. As we stood gazing up at the elaborately painted ceiling, Julia noticed the thin corridors located along the perimeter of the dome. "I want to walk in the ceiling," she announced. Paul and I looked at each other doubtfully. The path up to the dome had 463 steps and no lift. Neither of us were exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of carrying a child up or down any portion of those 463 steps. "I think it's beautiful and I want to see it up close," Julia persisted. "I won't complain about the steps." I shrugged my consent. "If she wants to see the ceiling of the Duomo that badly, I think we kind of have to do this," I whispered to Paul.

Julia's inspiration: the Duomo dome

926 steps later, we had admired the ceiling up close and emerged at the top of the dome, with the entire city of Florence laid out before us. We had taken our requisite photos, admired the view and counted off each and every step as we made our way back down. Neither child had voiced a single word of complaint. They were both high from the experience, incredibly proud of their stamina and excited about what they'd done and seen. "That," Julia told me happily, "was not boring."

Please explain to me how the same children who whine at climbing the single flight of stairs up to our flat were not even winded at the top of this ridiculously high building...

With this kind of motivation and excitement from our kids, Florence was the surprise hit of our trip. I had been unsure how we were going to do in a city so focused on art, but once we completely chucked any museum hopping aspirations, it was great. Art is everywhere in Florence, so why not leave the Uffizi and the Academia with their timed entrances and huge crowds and velvet ropes to the other tourists? We found beauty in other places -- in the Duomo and Baptistry ceilings, which awed and impressed my kids, in the extensive greenery and breathtaking views of the Boboli Garden, in the glittery gold of the Ponte Vecchio, in the markets full of buttery leather and colorful scarves, in a little storefront museum filled with beautifully constructed wooden machines which helped my children to get a hands-on understanding of Da Vinci's inventions, in the piazzas where they played, and most especially in the pizza, pasta dishes and colorful selection of gelato in which we indulged at every opportunity.

David, schmavid. People, this is art.

By the time we left Florence on a train bound for Venice, we were all more than a little in love with the place and I was wishing I'd packed my fat jeans. It was time to move on, though, and we were all ready and excited to keep going. Tune in next time for Venice, where all the bridges looked exactly the same yet I still felt compelled to pause and photograph each and every one of them. And every gondola. And every water view. And every mask shop. (Don't worry. If you skim -- or even skip -- that particular Flickr set, I'll never know the difference.)

Photos from the Pisa and Florence legs of this trip are now up on Flickr if you want to check them out!

On making travel accessible for children

2008-04-09T16:06:00.005Z

The train rolled through the Tuscan countryside en-route from Florence to Venice. Julia was hard at work planning our Venice itinerary, working from a series of articles I'd printed out about taking children to Venice. None of these articles were particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of Venice as a family vacation destination, but Julia seemed unwilling to let this dampen her own enthusiasm for the next leg of our trip.

"Venice may be a great town for kids to live in," Julia read aloud, "but it probably wouldn't be anyone's first choice as a tourist destination for the preschool through junior-high crowd. Hand a copy of Venicewalks or Venice: A Literary Companion to a child, and you're likely to hear, 'Mommy, why can't we go to Disney World?'" Scowling, she crossed these sentences out with a green marker and wrote "not true" in the margins of the page. "We don't need Disney," she told me proudly. "We're going to love Venice."

I smiled in agreement, trying not to look too smug as I sized up my 6 year old travel snob. "Obviously the kids described in those articles must not be the kind of experienced travelers that you are," I replied, to which Julia beamed in response. As she returned to her list making, I turned back to the window to drink in more of the most unbelievably gorgeous views I've ever seen. Evan, who had been following the conversation, also turned to follow my gaze.

"Hey," he shouted, his high pitched voice overcome with excitement, "I think the Little Einsteins have been here!"

Chalk one up for Disney after all.

(Just back, obviously, from a week long trip to Pisa, Florence and Venice... one of our best holidays to date. Photos and a trip report to follow soon!)

Oceans apart (in more ways than one)

2008-04-01T13:04:00.005Z

Prior to our London move, I consulted every source I could find for information and advice about moving to the UK. Unable to anticipate the shape our lives would take in the coming months, I hung on ever word ever written about the expat experience. Only some of the conventional wisdom that I so diligently took to heart turned out to be particularly accurate or applicable, but I was on the whole very grateful for all of my pre-move research and preparation once we arrived here. (I am, however, still using up a stash of Secret deodorant purchased in a frenzied pre-move Target spree after I read somewhere that English deodorant doesn't work very well. "Did you expect us all to smell all the time?" an amused English friend asked me recently after I confessed to this misconception. "Um, yeah, I guess I did," I replied ruefully. Is it any wonder that the whole ugly American stereotype holds strong around here?)

I've been told that repats (or returning expats) often have an even harder adjustment upon arriving back in their home countries than they experienced when they first moved abroad. It makes sense; you move back to a place that you consider "home" only to find that you have changed and the place has changed and nothing fits as you expected. When living abroad, you had a ready excuse for your cultural confusion and occasional ignorance, but that excuse rapidly disappears when you hit your home soil. You're left in a place that looks, yet doesn't feel familiar, trying to figure out how to break back into a community which has quite rightly gone on in your absence.

It sounds quite dreadful, doesn't it? I'm certain that it is at least partially accurate, of course; it seems awfully naive to think that I could just slide back into my former life as if nothing had changed. But just as I have been delighted to discover for myself that my friends here don't actually smell, I'm choosing to believe that my repat experience won't always stink either. No, I don't expect this move to be without its challenges and frustrations, but I've weathered my share of those here and come out the other end, so surely I can do the same back there. Just to be on the safe side, I'm once again attempting to forestall the inevitable challenges that lie ahead by doing my research in advance, however, this time by devouring every resource I can find for British citizens who are moving to the US.

Stop laughing. I'm not deluded enough to believe that I've become British after less than 2 years here. There aren't a lot of repat resources to be found out there, however, and my appetite for things to obsess over is insatiable. So I figured maybe I'd at least find a bit of a clue about American lifestyle issues which might be likely throw me after having lived in the UK if I looked to my British equivalents in the US. It worked... to a point.

I found plenty of discussion on British expat forums about the mysteries and challenges of life in the US. Some of it I was able to gloss over right away. I will not have visa issues, nor trouble obtaining a Social Security number, and no one is likely to tease me about my accent. Hell, I won't even be missing bangers and mash. Maybe this won't be so hard after all, I thought. But then I kept reading. People who move to America from the UK find the clothing styles boring and predictable after European fashions, I discovered. Fair enough. I don't dress all that European now, but I can make an attempt to jazz up my wardrobe before I head back. People who jump the pond in reverse also can't figure out the lack of electric kettles in American kitchens. I agree whole heartedly with this one. Fortunately, I've pre-shopped at Target and I think I'm good there. Moving on. Everyone misses the prevalence of pubs and many who have landed in suburban America bemoan the loss of their walking lifestyles. Oh, God. Those are some of the things I love most about London. Am I going to be miserable driving around in my gas guzzler back in the US???

As the panic began to set in, I hit the kicker, the longest thread in the whole forum. Pages and pages and pages of discussion about the issue that this group of British expats appear to find the hardest about life in the US. They hate American washers and driers. Life would be good again, it appears, if only they could return to something like this (you know, that appliance which is naturally broken for the gazillionth time right now, just as I am attempting to recover from a week of missed washing opportunities due to house guests while simultaneously trying to gear up for a week-long trip to Italy).

Call me crazy, but I think I'm going to be just fine back in the good ole' US of A.

My Bologna has a first name

2008-03-25T14:03:00.007Z

Our agenda for the weekend was really remarkably low key. Food. Lots of really good food. Wine. Lots of really good wine. Some retail therapy, maybe, and a bit of culture perhaps. Whatever we happened upon was bound to be good. I don't think any of us even glanced at a guidebook before we set foot on the plane, so relaxed were we about this trip. This was not to be a journey of itineraries and carefully timed meals. We had no need of such travel shackles. For once, we would not be going anywhere or do anything that was stroller accessible, whine inducing, kid-friendly, or bo-ring. And damn, were we giddy about that.

All American expats living in London, we are by virtue of our current circumstances a reasonably well traveled group. Between us, we have shuttled 10 children between the ages of 1 and 7 to virtually every European city, as well as quite a few more far-flung holiday destinations. We've each got the traveling with kids thing down to a science, from the rectal thermometers in our toiletries bags to the ability to say "chicken nuggets" in absolutely any language to playground-divining instincts which would put a homing pigeon to shame. Traveling with children, we all agree, is wonderful and culturally important and absolutely worth the effort. It is also a royal pain in the ass, which is why we all jumped on the opportunity to ~~ditch the little ones~~ leave our offspring to bond with their fathers for the weekend while we spent a few days in Bologna.

Why Bologna? I mentioned the well-traveled thing, right? Once we'd eliminated every place that at least one of us had visited in the past year or so, there weren't really very many places left within a few hours' reach of London. We contemplated some serious second and third tier cities in our search for a destination, before finally deciding that it didn't much matter where we went provided we actually went somewhere. The Northern Italian city of Bologna looked like it would provide just enough sightseeing to keep us busy, but not so many "must see" attractions that we would feel guilty about eschewing them in favor of a glass of wine at some cute little outdoor cafe somewhere. The flight times were convenient and the fares weren't too insane. And of course, there was that fun Oscar Mayer theme song to add a little kitsch to our weekend. Who could say no to O-S-C-A-R?

From the moment we saw the shop located directly next to our hotel, it was clear that we had picked an excellent destination to visit without our children.

"I think I'm seeing a blog post emerging here," Christine muttered to me moments later as I focused my camera on a fountain in Piazza Maggiore.

She was right. Bologna's adult delights were without a doubt worthy of a blog post. But those delights, as it turned out, were not nearly as X rated as my early photos of our trip might have indicated. Instead, the delights of the flesh we encountered in Bologna took the form of food.

Lunches that looked like this:

Shop displays that that looked like this:

Our purchases in Bologna may not have been made at that silly little store next to our hotel, but they made us dizzy with anticipation all the same.

I got bronchitis and felt like hell. Karen's husband got called away to New York on business just as we were leaving Gatwick, resulting in unbelievably complicated last minute child care calisthenics. Both Suzy's husband and Christine's husband managed to lock themselves and their children out of the house while we were gone. But the four of us had a fabulous adults-only weekend in Bologna anyway.

Cheers!

There's a bee in the bonnet pun to be made here, but I'm still too incoherent to make it

2008-03-19T12:42:00.005Z

(The Girlfriend Getaway post is coming when I have the time and energy to sort through my photos. But first this...)

"How are you feeling?" my friend Sarah asked sympathetically as she very kindly dropped Evan off at home after school on Monday so that I wouldn't have to leave the house in my sickly state. I sort of groaned and leaned against the door jam limply. "Oh, well then you'll be delighted to see this," she said brightly, handing me a missive from Evan's teachers. I glanced at the sheet and then groaned again.

"Wednesday is Easter Bonnet Day," the note enthusiastically proclaimed. Each child, I read on, must decorate their own bonnet ("remember, any hat will do!") at home and bring it in on Wednesday morning to wear in the school parade. "Your bonnet could look like this," the sheet cheerfully continued, followed by a picture of what an Easter bonnet might look like if the entire team of Project Runway set to work to create the perfect Easter ensemble. "Be creative!" I was dangerously close to audibly weeping as I thanked Sarah, shut the door and crawled back into bed.

I'm not Martha Stewart on the best of days, and these have not been my best days. But Evan needed a hat and a hat he would have. Julia promised to help and I pumped myself up with antibiotics and fever reducers in an effort to rise to the challenge. I was in a delirious enough state by then that I was beginning to see Easter bonnets that didn't really exist, but Evan kept us firmly on course. Together, we would create the perfect bonnet, provided I didn't keel over or cough up a lung first.

We took the "any hat" option very seriously and started with Evan's fireman's helmet. A covering of purple tissue paper, a swig of star garland and an assortment of Easter-themed Hama bead creations later, my boy had a bonnet.

In my feverish state, I actually thought it looked quite fine indeed. Aw, hell, if he forgives me for the purple butterfly costume some day, surely he'll forgive me for this as well...

Things that suck

2008-03-18T10:40:00.003Z

Here's a fun little pop quiz. Which sucks more:

A. Getting bronchitis and a high fever.
OR
B. Getting bronchitis and a high fever while away on a "I never get to do anything this cool" European getaway weekend with girlfriends.

Too easy? OK, then try Part Two of the fun pop quiz. Which sucks more:

A. Having bronchitis and a high fever.
B. Having bronchitis and a high fever on an airplane that seems unable to regulate its temperature (oh, wait, maybe that was me).
OR
C. Having bronchitis and a high fever when your children have to be delivered to and from school on foot.

I'll leave you to reach your own conclusions. I'm headed back to bed.

Prioritizing

2008-03-13T12:38:00.006Z

I had the best of intentions for this week, really I did. I was going to accomplish so many things, to channel my energy in such a way that I maximized my time and minimized my to do list.

None of it happened, of course. I was thwarted by the force of nature that is a Cranky Ill Child.

If I owe you a phone call or an email, so sorry for my silence. If you thought that you would see me somewhere this week, I apologize for my absence. If I've promised to get something to you, I hope you weren't in any rush. If you were looking for a blog post from me, I trust you've found more timely reading material elsewhere. If you thought I was actually going to feed your family an Easter dinner after you flew 3,000 miles to see us next weekend, uh... don't get your hopes up for anything spectacular.

My to do list only grew this week and my wheels spun mightily. But my Cranky Ill Child made his way back to quasi-health in time to dazzle the audience with his spellbinding performance in the role of Purple Butterfly #1 (or Purple Butterfly #2, maybe -- it was a little hard to tell) in his school concert.

There's always next week for the to do list.

A mile (and then some) in my shoes

2008-02-29T19:57:00.003Z

I left the house at about 8:30 this morning, walked Evan to his school building and then walked Julia to hers. After I'd dropped the kids I continued on to the grocery store, where I was lucky enough to bump into a friend who had driven there. "I'll give you a ride home with your packages," she offered, and I was more than happy to accept; I wasn't planning to buy all that much, but I usually catch the bus home from the market and those final few blocks that I have to walk on foot with all of those shopping bags are a killer. (Thanks again, Katie!)

An hour or so later, I was off on foot again, back to Evan's school where I retrieved him and a friend, met up with the friend's mum and shepherded everyone back here for lunch. We had a lovely playdate, but it was over too soon; not much time to play, really, when the walk back to Julia's school had to be factored into the time equation. Evan and I said our goodbyes to our friends, went to pick Julia up, and then walked on to the Tube station. I handed the kids a steady stream of snacks as we caught the train to Baker Street and then walked the 10 minutes from there to their swim lessons. An hour and a half later, we emerged and trudged the three blocks or so to the bus stop. Their hair was still a little wet, but it was raining anyway so I guess it didn't make much of a difference.

It was rush hour by now, so we waited on several busses before one actually stopped for us. When it did, we packed in like sardines and stood for the 10 minute ride. The kids were way too tired to walk the 15 minutes home from the spot this bus left us off, so we waited at least that long for a second bus, trying to keep warm in the inadequate shelter of the bus stop as the wind howled by us. When the C11 finally came, Evan started to cry because his preferred seat was already occupied, Julia started to whine because she was tired and I very nearly violated the poor man standing behind me when the driver turned sharply to the left before I'd really had a chance to get my footing. (In my defense, it was no easy task to juggle Julia's school bag, the backpack full of wet swimming gear, the carrier bag full of snacks and sandwiches to carry the kids through the journey, and the stroller Evan couldn't quite manage without but didn't exactly care to ride in either.) I apologized profusely as I steadied myself, reassuring the kids that we were nearly home and that I was proud of their efforts. Only a 7 minute ride and a 5 minute walk to go.

I know that I often extol the benefits and the virtues of life without a car. I mean every word of praise that I utter; I am in far better shape for all of the walking I do on a daily basis and public transportation can in theory carry me and my family pretty much anywhere we want to go here. But sometimes, the ease and convenience of a car would be awfully nice indeed. Today was one of those days.

Anticipatory nostalgia

2008-02-27T18:28:00.007Z

They are beautiful all year round. In the spring and summer, they shade the street with a canopy of green which feels impossibly lush for the urban landscape that surrounds them. That canopy becomes a carpet in the autumn, a sidewalk blanketed with the largest leaves I've ever seen; proof positive that everything about this country -- even its trees -- has an age and a longevity I could never expect to find in the US.

Those autumn leaves have long since been cleared away and the green canopy still exists only in my wistful future. Right now, beauty can be found in the mottled skin of bare bark and the spidery reach of branches. I admire their stark outline against the winter sky, trying to burn the image into my memory. The next time the trees outside my house look like this, we will be gone.

This post is solely the opinion of the author. It is presented as humorous observation and does not imply any bias or bigotry. All rights reserved.

2008-02-22T11:05:00.011Z

One of my favorite differences between English and American culture is the discrepancy in the way we express ourselves in print advertising. In sharp contrast to the careful, over-analyzed, painstakingly worded, extensively-focus-grouped, legal-reviewed-to-death copy we seem to turn out in the States, the English seem much more focused on being witty and conversational than on being politically and corporately correct. There are exception in both cultures, of course, but overall I have found the writing in adverts here to be remarkably more candid, notably more relaxed and generally far wittier than in the ads I see in America.

(Did you notice that? I had to note the exceptions there. Couldn't leave that disclaimer alone. Might as well wave my own little American flag in the air now... no doubt which culture still exerts a prevailing influence over my instincts.)

It's ironic given the fact that our cultural stereotypes would lead one to expect much more formality on this side of the pond than on the other. But I have to think that the American advertising industry actually has a lot to learn about the merits of being informal from the British, improbable as that might sound. Just think how much easier life would be, not to mention how many more trees would still be standing in the US, if the legalese on American marketing materials looked more like this:

My parents dragged me to the countryside and all I saw was a big pile of rocks (subtitle: uh, Julia, that was Stonehenge...)

2008-02-18T19:20:00.008Z

The kids had last week off of school (yes, again), so we headed off to Wiltshire for a few days to see a bit more of the English countryside and enjoy some uncharacteristically sunny February weather.

It was one of those lovely last second trips that comes together as if you'd spent weeks on end planning every detail. (We'd been doing plenty of that planning stuff, in truth, but none of it had resulted in any concrete plans. Instead we'd waffled so endlessly about where we might want to spend this February Half Term that we had never actually booked anything, with the end result that this charming "winging it approach" was actually more default than design. But shhh... don't tell anyone. I like the idea of appearing to be a spontaneous and carefree traveler even if nothing could be further from my nature.) When the weather report showed an unprecedented number of sunny days ahead, we borrowed a guidebook, booked a room in one of the B&Bs the book recommended and set off a day later. (True, true, all true. This had been the only plan -- to do some last minute planning -- and it worked. But the angina it caused me... oy.)

For three beautiful days, we enjoyed the great outdoors as we tracked wild horses in the New Forest, collected sea shells on the Christchurch beaches and bounced on the giant trampoline in the yard of our B&B. We got a bit of culture visiting the cathedral and city of Salisbury and we ate terrifically at the local pubs. We even did the typically touristy thing and visited Stonehenge, which I have to say interested and even awed me far more than I'd anticipated. And throughout all of this fun spontaneity, we were treated to the newest word in my daughter's vocabulary, repeated endlessly at each stop along the way.

"BO-RING."
Apparently, 6 is the new 16 where family outings are concerned because seemingly overnight, our engaged and interested travel companion has morphed into a pre-pre-pre-teen. Everything is boring and lame and unworthy of her excitement. We are boring and lame and unworthy of her excitement for suggesting any of these activities, not to mention how boring and lame we are for daring to show our own (gasp) enthusiasm.

Thankfully, she hasn't quite perfected her technique yet. There are still flashes of delight that she can't quite hide and quite a few moments when she plumb forgets that she's not supposed to be enjoying herself. She's still conditioned enough to smile whenever I stick a camera in her face. The sneer is not fully formed yet, the disdain still overruled by her overwhelming desire for our affection and attention. Pieces of our cheerful world traveler still remain for now. But she's increasingly... bored (or so she claims). At six.

I suddenly have a feeling that our impending return to American life and the end to our regular traveling adventures which it will bring are going to arrive not a moment too soon.

The last of the happy family travel photos?

All he ever really needed to know he learned in pre-Reception

2008-02-06T09:12:00.000Z

To be fair, I should clarify the Evan reading thing. He is beginning to read, but not necessarily because of any great stroke of brilliance on his part. Yes, I think Evan is brilliant because he's my son, of course, but I think he's reading because of the English educational system. He has been systematically taught to read in school this year, which makes the fact that his reading light bulb has clicked on exciting and gratifying, yes, but somewhat less awe-inspiring than if he had simply picked up Hop on Pop one day, examined the words on the page and pronounced it great literature. (Might he have done that anyway if his teachers hadn't intervened with their Letterland characters and their Jolly Phonics techniques? I guess we'll never know.)

Watching Evan learn to decode the written word has been fascinating because the process has been so completely different than the way his sister began to read. She was a head-under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight kind of kid who actually did teach herself to read, almost entirely without help or intervention. I never understood her process or her technique and neither did she, it seemed; one day she just... knew what all of the words said. (All of them. Seriously.) She was -- and still is -- a whole word reader, and it was only later in school that she doubled back and learned the phonics rules behind the whole business. As a result, she's a fantastic reader but a horrific speller, and she still struggles a bit with the process of sounding things out. She simply seems to recognize 99% of the words in the English language, so when she comes across an unfamiliar name or a word she's never heard before, it can completely confound her. Evan, in comparison, is already shaping up to be a better speller than Julia and he's not at all bothered by the process of sounding out a word he doesn't recognize. But simple everyday words which just do not follow the laws of phonics flummox him to no end. I presume this is a time and experience thing, but I'm no help since my experience with Julia leads me to make useful suggestion like "well, just look at the word and see what it says."

Now that Evan is classified a "reader" in school, he has his own special reading folder which he brings home with him every afternoon. Each day, he receives a new game or activity designed to strengthen and encourage his reading skills. To me, this sounds suspiciously like homework for my barely-4 year old. I remain skeptical and a little disparaging about the whole idea of teaching children this age to read in the first place; I now can't deny that it can be done and I also can't deny that my child is overjoyed about the whole thing and that's all terrific of course, but I also still wonder whether it's necessary and how this is going to help Evan to do his very best at the sand and water table in American pre-K next year. The homework thing pushes me over the edge, though; every time I sit down to play one of these games with Evan, I feel like the flash card-wielding Mommy of my worst nightmares. I'd just blow it off, except predictably, Evan loves his reading folder and can't wait to get to work each afternoon.

This morning, Evan and I realized simultaneously that in all of the excitement of his birthday, he'd never done his reading work yesterday. He looked like he was on the verge of freaking out about it and I was in a hurry to get us all out the door, so I set the 2 worksheets on the table and told him to go grab a pencil. "This stuff is easy for you," I told him. "I'm sure you can finish it while I get breakfast together." I was right; I came back less than 5 minutes later to find that the work was done, and we all ate breakfast in peace. But it occurred to me later that perhaps this tantrum-avoidance tactic was a dumb move on my part. Evan is a sponge right now and he's learning things left and right which will undoubtedly stay with him throughout his academic career. From his teacher, he's learning to read. And from his mother? Apparently, he's learning from me that it's not a problem if he parties too hard because he can always just do his homework quickly at the breakfast table the next morning. Which one of us do you think he'll thank in his valedictory speech some day?

The annual birthday letter

2008-02-05T10:20:00.000Z

Dear Evan,

Despite my best efforts to hold back time, it's February 5 again and today you are 4.

You've spent hours over the past few weeks pouring over the photographs of your first few years. As your fourth birthday has approached, you've asked me again and again to sit with you and look at your baby pictures, to tell you the stories that comprise your short history. In addition to our marathon photo viewing sessions, you've also initiated countless conversations lately about the fact that you are now a big boy, as well as a handful of sweetly reminiscent discussions about the things you've loved about being little. It's obvious that you're processing this 4 thing, that in your mind, you've taken the step from little to big with this birthday.

I'd beg to differ (4 is still awfully little and you've got a long way still to go on this growing up thing), except the thing is, there has been a dramatic change in you over the past few weeks. You've apparently thought this all through and decided that you're older now and that you're going to act the part. After years of playing the role of the family baby, you're suddenly standing taller and expressing mature thoughts and working so hard at being big. I must confess, I look at you and I still see a little boy, but if you look in the mirror and see something different then far be it for me to interfere. I've been waiting for years for you to put on your own coat and brush your own teeth, and if 4 is suddenly the age where you can be responsible for such things? Bring it on.

It's been a little surprising to me as I've participated in your ritual reminiscing to discover how much of the last 4 years I've already forgotten. I'd have been in big trouble these past few weeks without the photographs I've archived and the stories I took the time to write down along the way. I don't see how that can be, how I could so quickly have forgotten what's really still recent history, but apparently this getting older thing is happening to me, too. My memory is only going to get worse, I suspect, and if you're going to continue to expect me to be able to regale you with the tales of your youth, I'd better keep writing stuff down quick before it disappears forever. And so here goes... a written snapshot of you on your 4th birthday.

At 4, you are passionate about purple. And Sesame Street -- the Count in particular. You adore travel and trying new foods but you only like the milk in London. You beg to be tickled. You color in the lines precisely and you are the world (or at least local) Musical Statues champion. You have a giggle that is contagious and a grin that makes adults just a teensy bit nervous. You quietly take yourself off to your bed for a little rest when you are tired. You have the squeakiest, highest pitched voice I've ever heard. You can be reasoned and rationalized with most of the time, but you also still believe in the power of the 1, 2, 3 countdown. (Thank God for that.)

At 4, you play cricket every day on the school playground with your best friend Ben. There are no cricket balls or bats there, but it doesn't much matter; the two of you can pantomime an imaginary cricket game with far more finesse that you can play with the actual equipment. You love many physical activities, from football (soccer!) to dancing to scootering, but nothing on Earth compares to an imaginary cricket game as far as you're concerned. I half suspect that you'll have the entire 4 year old population of our American hometown equally devoted to the sport within months of our return.

At 4, you are persistent. If you are interrupted mid-thought, you will go back to the beginning and tell your whole story again from start to finish. There is absolutely no point in rushing you along; you are going to say what you are going to say and no one is going to prevent you from communicating whatever it is that you wish to share. Woe betide the person who tries -- or the adult who does not build an extra half an hour into every activity or outing to allow for your monologues.

At 4, you are caring. You seem to always say the right thing, made all the more right because you're not doing so intentionally. You regularly compliment people and tell them how much they mean to you, not because you think that people want to hear these things but because they are the things that you genuinely think and feel. You have a lot of love in your heart and you're not afraid to share it. Needless to say, it comes back to you a thousand times over. I am constantly prying you out of the adoring clutches of some other small child when it is time for us to leave a place.

At 4, you are determined. You have begun to read at the age of 3 simply because you believed it was time for you to learn, and you have recently stopped sucking your fingers during the day because it seemed to be time for that, too. Ditto skipping and hopping and riding a scooter and putting on your own clothing (finally!); when you decide to do something, it's pretty much a done deal. (There is, however, no telling you that is time to do something. Damned if I haven't tried.)

On the day you turned 4, you woke up slowly and a little bit grudgingly when Julia and I came into your room singing Happy Birthday. When we asked you whether you felt older now that you were 4, you spent a good long time considering the question and then you nodded solemnly. "I think that I do," you replied thoughtfully. Fair enough. Grow up if you must... I won't stop you. But please don't change too much along the way. Because who you are at 4 -- passionate and imaginative and persistent and caring and determined? Those are all traits which will make you a damn fine adult someday. They're also traits that make you a pretty amazing 4 year old right this very minute, though, so try not to rush too much, OK?

I love you, Evalah. But do I really need to say that here? I may not always remember every little detail of your life at 4, but I'll never, ever need a written reminder of how much I adore you or how lucky I feel to be your mom.

Love,
Mummy

When in London, do as the Turks do

2008-02-01T10:20:00.000Z

It's not often that I indulge in a spa day but when I do, I have a few basic requirements. Warm rooms. Soft lighting. Fluffy towels and bathrobes. No drop ceilings. A musical selection that goes beyond Enya. A permeating scent of lavender. Or sandalwood -- I'm not picky. The thoughtful touches don't matter much provided that there are some; it's not asking much, I would think, for a place that specializes in relaxation to set the mood a bit. But I willingly threw all those requirements out the window last week for a relaxing trip to the Turkish Baths at Ironmonger Row.

Going into this outing, I wasn't quite sure how to reconcile the description of this "haven of relaxation" with experienced friends' advice to bring my flip flops. Plunge pools and saunas and steam rooms all sounded lovely, but the Baths' location in the midst of a council block and the £7.70 price tag for three hours' relaxation tempered the mental image a bit. "It's like nothing else you've ever experienced," one of the friends who organized our little outing assured me. "It's certainly not luxurious, but it's relaxing all the same." I was intrigued, and since I was also pretty sure that I wasn't going to encounter any Turkish Baths back in the States, now seemed as good a time as any to give it a go. I packed up my flip flops and off we went.

There were 5 of us who made the trip together, and we met up in the lobby of the Leisure Centre which houses the Baths about an hour after the morning school run. I had envisioned an old building, possibly art deco or baroque, something uniquely European and undeniably charming in its age. What I found instead was a mid-1930s facility which looked suspiciously like an unrenovated YMCA. People were arriving for aerobics classes in other parts of the building and I even spotted a laundry off to one side where patrons appeared to be dropping off their bed linens and unmentionables for cleaning. This was a genuine Turkish Bath? On the up side, the towel that the receptionist handed me after I'd forked over my £7.70 was suitably fluffy (albeit a slightly glaring shade of aqua). If I closed my eyes, I thought as I followed my friends down a decidedly municipal-looking flight of stairs, maybe I could sink into my fluffy towel and imagine myself into that haven of relaxation I'd been promised.

Closing my eyes, as it turned out, would have been a terrible mistake. To be fully appreciated, these Turkish Baths needed to be seen and appreciated for what they were. An attendant showed us around the place -- a TV room with an attached kitchen and some plastic lounge chairs where one could get a sandwich or a cup of tea and have a chat. A changing room filled with beds of indeterminate age and some more loungers where you could read a magazine or have a little snooze. The promised plunge pool... a small, square of cement filled with freezing cold green water. (Was that eucalyptus or disinfectant in there?) Two marble slabs in a corner where one could get a scrub (though not today, we were informed, as the regular scrubber was home with an ill child). A pulsating, thick steam room (definitely eucalyptus this time). Three interconnected saunas which offered increasing amounts of heat as you moved through them. Down separate corridors, two massage therapy rooms and a large swimming pool. The whole tour took about two minutes. I was a bit dubious about the plunge pool, but the rest of the place looked OK if a bit basic. I donned a bathing costume and got down to the business of relaxing.

Several hours later, having steamed and heated and lounged to my heart's content, I met up with my friends in the TV room to order some lunch. I had just emerged from a surprisingly good half hour massage and was feeling undeniably relaxed, and my friends looked equally comfortable. As our attendant Ann prepared sandwiches and tea for us, we chatted with her and the other patrons in the room about the Turkish Baths experience. "A few years ago, they opened a spa down the road and all of our regulars went to try it," Ann told us as she settled down with her own cup of tea. "They were back a week later. Said it didn't compare to this place." A woman lying on a lounger in a bathrobe she'd clearly brought from home nodded her agreement. "I lived around the corner when I started coming here, but now I'm living in South West London," she said. "I tried a few local places, but in the end I came back here. I come every Friday. Sometimes I read the paper and sometimes I actually fall asleep, but I always look forward to a relaxing day." It was clear talking to this woman that she works hard the other 6 days a week, but her Fridays at the Turkish Baths are obviously an important priority in her life. I couldn't quite see myself toting my bathrobe and flip flops across London for this each week, but her description of her weekly visits to the Baths definitely got me thinking about life balance in a whole new way.

Our sandwiches, a bargain at £1.60 ("Are my prices OK?" Ann asked me as I counted out change for her), were just what we needed -- it's amazing how hungry relaxation can make a person. Even better was the conversation we enjoyed with Ann, who is clearly the heart of the place. A charming woman of indeterminate age, she has lived in the neighborhood all her life and maintained the Turkish Baths for the past 5 years. As we ate, she regaled us with stories about her life and the Baths and the regulars who frequent the place. I'm sure she's never had any formal PR or marketing education, but Ann's one heck of a natural saleswoman. She loves her work, which has seen her through an illness and sustained her even as she cares for an elderly mother at home, and her pride in her little domain is both undeniable and a bit inspiring. The more she talked, the more I warmed to this odd little place. I stopped thinking about how due the facility was for a good makeover and started appreciating it for the slightly bizarre oasis of calm it actually was. "There's no place like it," Ann told us proudly as we eventually left amidst a flurry of goodbyes and promises to return soon. I couldn't have agreed more.

Schadenfreude

2008-01-22T09:12:00.001Z

I came home from a book club meeting last night to find Paul smugly awaiting my return and knew instantly how he'd spent his evening. Sure enough, he waited only a few moments before ever-so-casually mentioning that he'd fixed the Mousetrap game.

I crouched on the floor to admire his handiwork and gave the ball a tentative flush. The first trap, one which had completely baffled me, worked perfectly. Impressed as I was, I also couldn't help grimacing a bit to see Paul so easily master that which had left me so stumped. But then I flushed again and watched with equal parts of my earlier frustration and a new sort of satisfaction as the second trap failed. By the time the third trap (the one I had managed to figure out earlier in the day) flopped, I had a little bit of a smile on my face. And then (then!) I discovered that one of those marbles which I'd predicted would be missing by nightfall was indeed gone. "Where's the third ball?" I asked as my smile spread to a mile-wide grin.

I left Paul on his hands and knees muttering as he searched for the ball and I headed off to bed. I felt much, much better.

Building a better mousetrap

2008-01-21T17:00:00.000Z

Julia has raced home from school, anxious to attack the pile of gifts which she received at her birthday party yesterday. The party timing was unfortunate; by the time the gifts were all opened and recorded onto the thank you note list, it was really too late in the evening to do much playing. It now appears, however, that anticipation may just have made the spoils all the sweeter. Julia has apparently spent the better part of the school day discussing her haul with friends and deciding which of her gifts she will play with first, and she is tearing plastic off of shrink wrapped boxes before I've even removed my coat.

First up is a board game which made Paul groan when he saw it come out of the wrapping paper last night. "I had that one when I was a kid," he had told Julia. "It's a pain to set up." I guess it's just as well she's selecting it now, as we have the whole afternoon ahead of us to figure out the set up. I've spent countless hours punching out cardboard squares and affixing decorative stickers and inserting Tab A into slot B in my career as a mother. I'm sure that I'm up for the challenge of a new board game.

Twenty minutes later, I've lost all of my bravado and am swearing softly under my breath as I survey the oddly shaped plastic pieces spread all around me. The incredibly detailed direction booklet, which I originally thought would be my salvation here, is mocking me. Nothing fits as it suggests. There are tiny rubber bands and weird cardboard cutouts to contend with. Completing Step 4 should feel like a small victory, but the knowledge that I have another dozen or so steps to go somewhat dulls any satisfaction I might otherwise have felt. The picture on the box isn't helping at all. The directions aren't much better. I am trying to resist the urge to simply duck tape the whole thing together haphazardly. My children, meanwhile, are ooing and aahing as they watch my progress over my shoulder. They are so excited to play this game. I'm doing this for them, of course. And it is for them, I tell myself, that I am swatting their hands away and screaming at them every time they so much as reach out to touch my handiwork. "Don't touch! Don't play with that!" I snap again and again. So far, this is really fun.

They wander off to check out a few gifts which require a bit less assembly, but my mission continues. I am not going to let this game defeat me. I am an educated, intelligent, capable woman. Surely, I can put together a board game. "I can do this," I mutter repeatedly as I doggedly work my way through the directions. And, it turns out, I can. I really can assemble a board game. I am gleeful in my victory until I notice that it has taken me just under an hour and a half.

The children return to see what I've accomplished and are delighted to see the game set up. I still have a page and a half worth of directions to read before I'll be able to teach them how to play the game but first, my new bible informs me, we should check to make sure all of the traps work correctly. The children drop three small marbles (sure to be gone by nightfall) into the plastic toilet to start the game. This in itself is worthy of hysterical giggles, of course. I'm so glad that I've taken the time to put this game together. Ceremoniously, they flush. Only one of the three traps I've built so laboriously appear to work correctly. "If a trap doesn't work," the directions advise me in the kind of large red lettering which leads me to believe that I may not be the first person to encounter this kind of difficulty, "see the relevant section and check all parts are assembled to the board correctly." I sigh and flip back a few pages.

The children start touching things again. Every single time they lay a finger on anything, it falls apart. As I resolve a problem on one part of the board, they create 4 or 5 others. I'm no longer even quite certain what needs to be fixed. If they can do this much damage just admiring the board, what's going to happen when there are dice and game pieces and the joy of victory and the agony of defeat to contend with? I can't think about that now, though, not if I'm going to get this thing done. I shoo the kids away again, begging them to just keep their hands away from the board for a little while longer. "I'm almost there," I promise. "Pretty soon, we can all play." I try not to notice the look that passes between Julia and Evan. I have a sneaking suspicion that they may not have all that much confidence in my abilities here. "It's OK," I assure them. "This is going to be a great game."

They smile unconvincingly at me and then Julia turns to her brother. "Come on Evan, she says. "Let's go play The Magic Tooth Fairy Game." Evan crows with delight and they race off to find the box. Minutes later, I hear the happy laughter of my children as they enjoy a board game together. I sigh and push away the still-incomplete Mousetrap board. My legs are so cramped that I can barely get to my feet. I may not be able to put together a board game, I tell myself with a wry smile, but I can see the future. And it is because of my amazing fortunetelling abilities that I know with absolute certainty that this game is going to get lost in our move back to the U.S.

Deja vu

2008-01-15T10:58:00.001Z

Several people have commented to me in the past week or two that my blog entires have been overwhelmingly focused on our return to the States lately. They're right, of course, but the irony in this is that the US is not at all where my mind has been of late.

We have always said that we were going to be in London for two years. Paul signed a two year contract and we set up our lives here based on the assumption that this was a temporary 24 month endeavor. We have made it a point to travel as if we are on a timeline, to maintain ties in the US in anticipation of our return there. But we've never known 100% for certain that Paul's company would respect our wishes to return to the US after the completion of his contract. There was always the chance that we would be asked to stay longer, always the chance that we would be faced either with an offer we could not refuse or simply the reality that there was no job waiting for Paul in New York any more.

And so even as I've talked about and planned for and expected a move back to the US this summer, I've also found myself quietly looking at local real estate and job opportunities for me and school situations for my kids here, just in case. Quite honestly, it didn't sound like such a bad possibility when examined in isolation. Every time I would see or talk to American friends and family I would dismiss it, of course; faced with the reality of the people I love, it was hard to contemplate being away from them for a minute longer than I already have been. But here, immersed fully in our London life? Well, I'd be lying if I said the prospect didn't hold a certain appeal.

Yesterday, Paul finally had a conversation with his boss about the coming year. There was an offer to keep him here, as anticipated, but it was one he could easily and fully refuse. It appears that his department is fully on board with his return to New York and he now has a verbal commitment from his boss that he will be transfered back sometime in the next 6-8 months. And so, while the details and the timing and the nitty gritty of it all will still need to be hammered out in the coming months, I can now say with far more certainty than I've ever felt before that our time overseas will be coming to an end this summer and we will be moving home. (You can breathe now, Mom.)

I should be elated. I'm going back to a life that is comfortable, a world that I can negotiate my way through instinctively and a community that I adore. And yet, now that I know that for sure that we won't be staying in London beyond this summer, I'm a bit surprised to discover just how sad this makes me. "Did you really think there was that strong a possibility we would stay?" Paul asked me last night as we talked about all of this. I didn't. Not really. But as long as the possibility was there, however remote, I could close my eyes to the realities of leaving England behind.

I love it here. I love the people we've met and the friends that we've made -- all four of us. I love the fact that I walk nearly everywhere and that I can easily find my way nearly anywhere else using public transportation. I love having Europe on my doorstep and a school calendar which provides ample opportunity to take advantage of its proximity. I love the board that I serve on and the groups that I belong to and the strong, diverse group of women I've met through my involvement with them. I love the fact that my children are so happy, and so clearly established in a school which is 100% appropriate for their interests, abilities and personalities. I love the fact that I have half a dozen wonderful places to purchase groceries within walking distance and the fact that I know automatically which place will have the best stock to meet my needs on any given day. I love one-floor living and the silly little Ikea-flat which has come to feel like such a comfortable home. I love that my phone rings with fabulous opportunities and offers all the time now -- a girls' weekend in Europe, a Bunko group, a business opportunity, coffee after school drop off, a movie on a Saturday night. I love hosting the American friends and family who come to visit us here and showing them the city we've come to call our own. I love the English sense of humor and outlook on life. Most of all, I love the person who I've become here, the one who conquered this city and made a life for myself and my family here.

We came to London 16 months ago for a two year gig, nervous and sad to be leaving behind the people we love, yet incredibly excited about the adventure ahead of us. We thought that we knew what we were getting ourselves into, but in truth, we had no idea. We simply had no idea how much we would grow to love it here. I'm glad we're going back to the US, truly I am. But the way I've felt about America these past 16 months, the yearning for familiar people and places and a life that I know and understand? I realize now that I'm going to feel the same way about England once we're gone. This time, we're not embarking on an adventure and nothing is temporary. We're making a permanent move to a place that's very different than that which we currently call home. And as exciting as that sounds in theory, I suspect that when push comes to shove, I'm going to be every bit as nervous and sad about this move as I was about our last one.

Here we go again.

Recently overheard Evan expressions which would no doubt get him beat up on any New Jersey playground

2008-01-14T17:15:00.000Z

"I'm having a lovely time."
"Oh, dear."
"I'm a bit worried."
"Can I have a go?"
"I need a proper coat today."
"Certainly not."
"I'm rather tired."
"I say, old chap." (Admittedly, the Backyardigans were the source of this particular gem. But with the British accent? Oh. God.)
"That is not acceptable."
"Oh, dearie me."

The Rule of Gum

2008-01-10T10:35:00.000Z

Dear Julia,

I don't remember how old you were when it all began. You were old enough to ask questions, but not old enough to challenge the answers too much. I was still idealistic about things like monitoring your sugar intake but no longer so besotted by the mere fact of your existence on this Earth that I felt the need to give in to each and every one of your requests. I guess you must have been somewhere around 2, give or take a few months.

The exchange was like millions of other exchanges that parents and their children have on any given day; you asked for something, I told you no, you asked when you could have it and I picked a completely random answer out of thin air. I couldn't even envision ever reaching the date I selected, which was probably what made it such an appealing choice at the time. But there it was, set in stone the moment the words were out of my mouth. You could have gum when you were 6.

I would have just as soon forgotten this conversation long ago, but that was impossible with you there to remind me of it so frequently over the years. Over time, the Rule of Gum began to feel not only arbitrary, but entirely ridiculous to me. You were enjoying any number of sugary treats far more damaging than a silly stick of gum. You were going off on sleepovers and other "big kid" adventures, but still barred from trying out one of the basic pleasures of childhood. Eventually, you were even beginning to lose baby teeth that had never even known the pleasure of chomping down on a big chewy square of Bubble Yum or a hard, gaily colored gumball. Why on Earth were we sticking to this silly, random rule? I would surely have rescinded the policy long ago were it not for one thing: your devotion to it.

For four years (give or take), you have waited with astounding patience to chew gum at the age of 6. You have not questioned the rule even as you've seen others around you abide by a different set of rules, politely refusing any gum offered to you by an adult or even a peer. It hasn't seemed to bother you one bit that other children have been jawing away at the stuff for years; if anything, I've always sensed in you a bit of disdain that they didn't follow the same -- clearly right because it's ours -- Rule of Gum that we do. You've read books about gum chewers and imagined up your own terrific tales involving the stuff. You've drawn pictures of gum and admired it endlessly in shop windows and candy displays. You've come up with fantastic, elaborate plans to keep your Halloween intake of gum fresh until the moment you would be eligible to enjoy it. But you have never once tried to sneak a piece, never once attempted to negotiate, change or even question the rule.

This is you on the cusp of 6, Julia. You believe steadfastly in rules and you follow them to the letter. You are far less influenced by what others think and say than what you know in your heart to be right and true. You read with avid curiosity about that which you have not yet experienced yourself. You are imaginative and creative and can spin whole worlds out of things you know nothing about. You are able to look longingly into the future, dreaming of what will someday be. But you live in the present and you wait your turn and you trust completely that you'll be rewarded for this in the end.

This morning, I woke you up by handing you the biggest, gooiest, sugariest square of gum that I could find in all of London. You didn't even look surprised. You just thanked me, popped it into your mouth and chewed carefully for a bit. And then you broke into a huge grin. I can't say for sure whether you were smiling because you liked the gum or because you were finally 6.

It takes most people the better part of a lifetime to learn that good things come to those who wait (hell, I'm still trying to learn this). But somehow, you knew it from the get go. I have no doubt at all that you have just the right mixture of patience and dogged determination necessary to get whatever it is you want out of life. May all of the things that you have to wait for along the way be as sweet as a piece of chewing gum when finally they are yours.

Happy birthday, my 6 year old gum chewing daughter. I love you with all my heart. Now go brush your teeth. (I may have woken you up with a piece of bubble gum, but I'm still your mother.)

Love,
Mommy

Reading between the lines

2008-01-09T10:03:00.000Z

Dear Director of the American Preschool Which Julia and Evan Used to Attend,

Enclosed, please find Evan's registration form for the 2008-2009 academic year. Oh please, oh please, oh please find a spot for him. Per our email exchange, I'm fully cognizant that spots are going to be very tight on the pre-K classes next year and I recognize that it will likely be impossible to get our first choice of classes if we even get a place at all. 45 pre-K children, 46 pre-K children... what's the difference, really? I promise to keep him home when the school accreditation team arrives to count heads if that's what it takes. However, I'm hopeful that something will open up somewhere and that Evan will be able to re-join a familiar and comfortable school environment to help ease his transition back to the States. Evan, Shmevan. Like he even remembers? It's me who desperately needs to re-join a community where I feel comfortable and at home when we return to the US. Please don't make me start over again!!!

I appreciate all of your advice about other local preschool programs and will certainly investigate other options if it becomes clear after the registration lottery that there really won't be a place for Evan in your school. Ugh. I so don't want to go through this hell again. How many times am I going to have to scramble to find school places for my children before they even reach formal schooling age? But the prospect of sending Evan elsewhere makes me so sad that for now, I think I'm just going to wait and keep my fingers crossed that this won't be necessary. Do you see me sticking my fingers in my ears and my head in the sand here? La, la, la... I don't hear you...

I look forward to receiving an update from you and hope that the news will be good! If not, maybe we'll just stay here in London where we know we're wanted. Evan actually has a school place in London (but no pressure or anything)... In the meantime, many thanks for all of your help and support. Would now be an inopportune time to mention all of the help and support that I've offered you over the years?

Fondly (and prepared to grovel if that's what it takes to get you to feel the same way),
Rebecca

Where the heart is

2008-01-04T14:00:00.000Z

"Oh, by the way, I put you down as my emergency contact on next year's preschool forms since you'll be back by the time the school year starts. It felt really good."

If ever I wondered where I belong these days, these two sentences casually thrown out in the middle of a mindless phone conversation about nothing in particular answered my unspoken question. I've found countless amazing things here in London, many of which I didn't even know I wanted or needed before I arrived. But the feeling of being wanted and needed myself? That's what I call home.

Season's greetings

2008-01-02T14:29:00.000Z

It is January 2 and by all rights I probably should have removed all evidence of the holidays by now. But I just can't bring myself to take down the dozens of cards that adorn my dining room wall. My excuse is that international mail is iffy and with the cards still arriving at a rate 2 or 3 a day, the ones still some to come deserve some display time, too. It's a flimsy excuse, though, and I know it. I'm simply not ready to let go just yet. I pause to gaze at the wall dozens of times each day, and I've noticed that my children and Paul do the same. We are all drawn to the smiling faces, the preprinted messages of holiday cheer and scrawled handwritten notes that hang there. Each one brings us such obvious pleasure that I am seriously beginning to consider leaving them up all year. Hell, it's not as if we have anything else to hang on that wall.

We all have our favorite cards, some which are treasured because of the people they feature, others which captivate purely on the merit of the gap toothed grins they display (there are a lot of missing teeth among the 6 year old set on our wall this year). There are some pictures of children I've never met before, born in our absence, and countless others of kids who would probably not even remember me at this point. A few have puzzled Julia and Evan ("who's THIS?"), but most are easily recognizable to me; everyone's grown over the past year just as my own children have, but the faces are familiar nonetheless. I note the changes as I study these photos, but appreciate most the things which remain the same. This one still won't smile for photos. That one still has that distinctive grin. I know that crumpled nose, that gorgeous mane of hair, that impish expression. If I still know these things, surely I will still know these children when we get back to the States, right? A handful of faces have changed so much that I scarcely recognize them, and it is these that I return to the most frequently. I gaze at their frozen images as if I can somehow get back all of the milestones I've I've missed while we've been away. Perhaps if I can burn their matured faces into my memory, they too will seem familiar to me when we return.

I've always enjoyed the annual sending and receiving of holiday cards, but here in London, our display of cards means more to me than ever. The grinning faces of our American friends and family are comfortingly familiar; the "we miss you" messages both heartwarming and meaningful in this, our second year away. The sprinkling of cards from friends here in London are new this year, a symbol of the real and lasting friendships we've finally begun to develop on this side of the pond. Those will be the ones that arrive bearing airmail stamps at this time next year, I can't help but think a bit sadly as I admire them. This is an odd time in our lives; we are between and betwixt and there are times when it feels like we don't belong anywhere at all any more. But from both sides of the Atlantic, here are the smiling faces of people who consider us a part of their communities. I doubt any of them realized just how much comfort and reassurance they were sending when they slid their pre-printed photo cards into an envelope for us and checked our name off their lists. But I am incredibly grateful for it all the same.

Rome for the holidays

2007-12-24T19:54:00.000Z

Rome, all of the guidebooks advised us, is not a city for children. There are few green spaces, even less kid-focused attractions and damned little in the way of relevant sights for the under-10 set. "They'll be welcomed, of course, but incredibly bored," one travel guide after another reiterated. The universal message was abundantly clear: take your offspring elsewhere.

A year ago, we probably would not have hesitated to take this advice to heart. New to the traveling with kids game, concerned about everything from finding family-friendly sleeping arrangements to creating playground-laden itineraries, we were gun shy about going anywhere -- even to places which professed to cater to children. Faced with a city so clearly uninterested in our little darlings, we would have run screaming faster than we could say arrivederci. (In our defense, it is very hard to say arrivederci with just the right accent...)

Thank goodness we've relaxed a bit in the past 15 months, or we would have missed an amazing trip to Rome. Yes, yes, there was vomiting. But the illness (and ubiquitous fever, of course) did not strike until the last night, it only struck one child and said child did not actually start throwing up until we were on the plane coming home. Granted, our re-entry to the UK and our first day back were a bit messier than anticipated, and I would obviously have preferred to be able to tackle the post-vacation laundry issue without first running emergency loads of Evan's sheets and pjs. But before all of this, we had nearly 4 healthy days in Rome. And contrary to popular guidebook opinion, the whole family had a terrific time.

OK, the guidebooks were sort of right. Not much in the way of green space in Rome, really, and even less in the way of real playgrounds. But a ride on a bicycle large enough for the whole family turned out to be a far more exciting park ride than any swing my children have ever tried.

And the books weren't wrong when they said that some of the appeal that adults find in the sight of Rome's beautiful piazzas full of fountains and ancient buildings might be lost on young children, I admit. But my children thought that the giant toy and sweet fair set up in Piazza Navona in honor of La Befana made a very appealing sight indeed.

There's no doubt that Paul and I were more awed by the ruins of ancient Rome than our offspring, just as the travel advice websites had predicted. But once some then/now overlay pictures in a book purchased outside the Colosseum helped our kids to understand what they were looking at, even a pile of old rocks and a few columns started to look pretty interesting to them, too.

Yes, a little bit of ingenuity and luck might just have tipped the scales in our favor where children and Rome were concerned. But it was the food factor which knocked the whole thing out of the park for us. Traveling with young picky eaters can be an incredibly frustrating and humbling experience. We've been forced to walk out of restaraunts in more cities than I'd like to admit because we simply could not make their menus work for our family. There have been screaming and hissing disagreements with our children in countles other eating establishments where we have foolishly attempted to strike a workable compromise in order to sample some local cuisine. We have stared longingly from afar at more fine dining venues than I care to recount after regretfully selecting more kid-friendly options. But not one of those things happened in Rome. We ate frequently, we ate well, and we were all happy (though perhaps a bit overstuffed) with what we consumed. Four days of near constant infusions of pizza, pasta and gelato may or may not have had a little something to do with the vomiting which brought our little Roman holiday to a close. But in the meantime, it helped ensure that we had been wise to ignore the nay-saying "experts." For this family with young children at least, there's been no place like Rome.

For those who like the pictures more than words, our Rome photos are up on Flickr. What a beautiful city (beauty, of course, being in the eye of the beholder)...

Famous last words

2007-12-23T15:21:00.000Z

"Yeah, my kids are prone to ridiculously high fevers almost every time they get the slightest bit sick. But they pretty much never vomit."

Is it necessary to elaborate any further on our trip to Rome?

Dreidel diversity

2007-12-12T15:51:00.000Z

I must admit, I tend to be a bit skeptical of schools' diversity rhetoric. Don't get me wrong; it is the rhetoric I have issue with, not the diversity itself. I think diversity in our schools is hugely important and it's a big part of what made northwest London such an attractive place for us to live and educate our children. But I don't believe that carefully stacking a classroom with two of each colour, as the independent schools seem wont to do here, adequately addresses the issue in and of itself. Such careful class assignments provide schools with indisputable evidence (right there in black and white) that they embrace diversity, but I sometimes wonder whether that somehow lets those schools off the hook where actually providing a culturally broad curriculum is concerned.

This week, however, I saw an example of diversity at its best in Julia's classroom. On the final day of Chanukah, several mothers came into school to teach the class about the history and traditions of the holiday. Well over a third of Julia's classmates are Jewish, so the Maccabees' story and the lighting of the menorah was old hat to many of the children. But not a one save her friend Yuki knew how to make an origami dreidel until his Japanese mother arrived alongside the Jewish mums with white, blue, gold and purple paper squares in hand. Julia came home from school that day bubbling over with excitement about her new Chanukah crafting skill. And I began to think that maybe the simple act of bringing people of different backgrounds and cultures together in a classroom does a lot more good than I'd ever realized.

It is around this time every year that I begin to wonder whether perhaps my time and talents might be better utilized by a return to the workforce

2007-12-07T11:18:00.001Z

Double layered on heavy cardstock, people. This year's invites are double layered things of beauty. (Of course, that's only because I misjudged my printer's ability to handle such heavy cardstock, but I want the credit for making the effort anyway.) I could have been planning major press tours or writing brilliantly pithy copy right this very moment, but no -- I left that all behind for the joy and rewarding work of raising my children. I can't ever get these years when my children are young back, and I don't want to miss them... remember that line? Yeah. Well now I also can't get back the gazillion hours of my life spent painstakingly hand-assembling invitations to a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory themed party ~~guaranteed to impress~~ which will hopefully hold the interest of the 6 year old crowd.

Do you suppose it would be overkill to whip up some nice media materials the way I used to when organizing events? Perhaps some salient talking points might help to help reinforce the key messages of this occasion. Julia is 6. Guests may celebrate by consuming copious amounts of candy. I need a resume and an interview suit. There. I think that sums it all up nicely.

Fun With Interfaith Parenting, the December edition

2007-12-03T19:57:00.001Z

"Hey, Evan, guess what? Chanukah starts tomorrow night!"

"Oh, wow! Chanukah! I'm so excited! Santa's coming tomorrow!!!"

What all the Yummy Mummies are wearing

2007-11-28T11:27:00.000Z

Cashmere baby doll hoodie: $40 at Old Navy
White cami: $10 at Gap Body
Skinny jeans: OK, these are messing up my shtick here because I bought them in the UK. They're Gap and therefore American, but I paid (far too many) pounds for them. Let's move on...
Super cute black shoes: $59 at DSW
UK-style look on a US-style budget: priceless (or at least a hell of a lot less pricey)

(Please don't burst my bubble by mentioning the several grand we spent on airfare so that I could save a few bucks on clothing...)

If I clicked those ruby red slippers, where would they take me?

2007-11-27T20:35:00.000Z

Home is my father, awaiting us in the airport with a faux chauffeur sign.
Home is enjoying a second cup of coffee in my flannel pajamas because someone else has already claimed the shower.
Home is my mother's binder full of menus and meal plans for a week's worth of house guests.
Home is revisionist history and the brother I share it with.
Home is Charades games and the annual lore of games in years past.
Home is a private joke, slipped into a backpack so that I would not see it until I was gone.

Home is ice cream cakes for birthdays, the more crunchies the better.
Home is a big lovable boxer with a far-too-large tongue.
Home is driving through familiar streets, singing along to familiar songs.
Home is the smell of the NYC subway and the lights of Times Square.
Home is Fujiyama Mama sushi and Target and DSW and a house which is mine, but not mine right now.
Home is our family -- by birth and by choice.

Home is clipped accents and orderly queues.
Home is my bed, my shower, my stuff.
Home is the place where my hair comes out right for the first time in days.
Home is the rhythm of school day routines.
Home is the friends who spot my children at the classroom door and surround them with giddy, joyful hugs.
Home is friends who welcome me, too, with an on-the-spot coffee date, an invite for lunch.
Home is the gossip and news that I've missed.
Home is endless laundry (at least 2 hours left on this load alone).

There is no doubt about it; I am at home on two continents now. There is a comfort and a satisfaction and a heady sense of accomplishment that comes with that knowledge. And yet, at the same time I am learning that my seemingly covetous dual sense of place comes with its own painful price. For I can never feel like I've come home without also feeling the loss of a home left behind.

I suppose the pilgrims must have been rather English, too

2007-11-20T14:39:00.000Z

The security guard smiled at my children as he checked our passports against our boarding passes. "Are you leaving home or going home?" he asked. We all looked at him and then each other. There was some head scratching and some hemming and hawing. None of us could quite formulate a response. Clearly this was a larger question for any of us than he'd anticipated, and I'm pretty sure the consternation with which we'd all responded to his casual question made the guy sorry he'd bothered to make polite conversation. We were still mulling over our answers as he waved us along.

Our second trip back to the U.S. since we moved to London was motivated by a need for pumpkin pie and family togetherness. We purposely didn't even tell friends we would be in the country this time around, choosing instead to spend a quiet Thanksgiving in the company of our family. (If you're just now finding out we're in town as you read this entry, please don't think we're just snubbing you... we're snubbing everyone!) I think that was the right choice; without a hectic visiting schedule, we've all been able to relax easily and just enjoy being here. American life feels familiar. It feels lovely. But it does not, truth be told, feel entirely normal.

I'm delighting over American prices and products, but I'm finding it hard to make change in dollars and I'm not such a fan of driving from strip mall to strip mall to make my purchases. I find little changed here and that's comforting, yet for some reason I keep finding myself talking about "this country" as if it is an entirely foreign entity. And just as I am tethered to my computer in London in order to feel connected to friends and family in the States, so do I keep logging on here to laugh at a complicated thread of emails from a group of my friends back in London who have been trying to agree on a date for a girls' night out.

Meanwhile, I've watched Evan delight at the sight of a 'Merican flag just like the one he has in London and Julia beeline for the American Girl section of the local library, both of which seemed like good signs that they had retained at least a bit of American identity. And yet when Julia commented (and Evan agreed) that America was a good place to visit because people speak English here, it became very obvious that this is a vacation destination for them rather than a homecoming. Our perspective, our priorities and our frame of reference have all shifted... subtly, perhaps, but not in a way I can ignore or deny, either. We may be very American in London, but here in New York, I daresay we're more than a little bit British.

Two days after our trip through Heathrow, I'm sure our small family has long since slipped the mind of the kind security guard who chatted with us on our way out of London. But I've been thinking about him and his question this whole time, unable to escape the feeling that there's far more at stake to my answer than just social niceties. Were we leaving home? Going home? It took me a while, but I think I finally know the answer. We were doing both.

I'm not sure I trust myself to give this one a title

2007-11-16T15:21:00.000Z

Our downstairs neighbor Daniel turned 2 yesterday and we popped in for cake after dinner to help him celebrate. Ever the foolish adult who insists on trying to relate to uninterested children, I couldn't resist telling his older sister Arielle, "you know, I have a younger brother named Daniel, too."

I suspect I've probably made this particular attempt at bonding with Arielle before because she didn't look in the least surprised at this revelation. She gamely played along, though. "Is he 2 also?" she asked me.

"No," Julia jumped in before I could reply. "He's a grownup. And," she added, shooting a withering you really should know these things about your own brother look in my direction, "his real name is Uncle Dan."

The Sound of Music

2007-11-12T13:39:00.000Z

I can't remember how old I was, nor can I remember who took me to see the production. All of those details fell aside when the curtain lifted on the King and I; nothing else mattered once Yul Brynner took control of that stage. I have no earthly idea what I was wearing, but I could still probably reconstruct many of the ornate costumes from memory. It beats me what we talked about as we waited for the show to begin, but I can still recite most of the song lyrics verbatim. The circumstances surrounding my presence at that performance slipped my mind years ago. But that joyful spine tingling emotion of watching it has never left me.

I've been to plenty of notable theatrical performances since that auspicious start, both in New York and here in London. I've loved some of the things I've seen and been indifferent to others. But I hadn't felt that spine tingling chill in a theatre again until this past weekend.

This time, the joy was in experiencing the familiar and beloved rather than discovering of the magical and unknown. The plot was one I knew by heart, the songs some of the first that I ever loved. The storyline brought back memories of a time when annual television airings were true events. The music brought back memories of a time when I had the self confidence and desire (but alas, not the talent) to step into the spotlight myself. The staging was superb, the cast outstanding and the performance on its own enough to inspire some chills, I suspect. But to top all of that off, my daughter sat rapt beside me quietly humming along, her eyes as wide with wonder as my own had been many years ago at my first big Broadway show. And the combination of my pleasure in what was happening on stage and my delight at what was happening beside me inspired nothing less than a serious case of the chills.

"Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could," Maria and the Captain sang on the vast stage before us. "So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good." I knew exactly what they meant.

There actually is a method to my madness

2007-11-09T18:06:00.001Z

After 14 months of fighting a losing battle with the stainless steel appliances in my London kitchen, I am delighted to have finally found a cleaning product which keeps fingerprints and streaks at bay. This product -- which I recently discovered at the most high end of our three local grocery stores -- is imported, and like all imported products, it comes at a premium. I have no issue with this in theory; I understand the whole cost of importation issue, not to mention the added appeal factor which enables retailers to up the price of fancy schmancy foreign goods. I'd already tried all of the locally manufactured products which are designed to clean stainless steel and none of them worked, so if the higher price tag on this product is what I have to pay to get something that actually works, so be it.

Sort of.

Except somehow, it really kind of burns me on to pay such a steep markup on this particular product.

Oh, me of little faith

2007-11-05T19:25:00.000Z

I casually mentioned the colouring craziness that has plagued our household to one of Evan's teachers right before we left for Barcelona and while she was obviously quite aware of his... er... attention to detail, she was surprised to hear quite how frustrated and upset he gets at home if he strays even slightly outside the lines. I didn't really expect much to come of the conversation, but felt better for having at least broached the topic. Perhaps his teachers would at least downplay the praise they generally heap on his colouring efforts, I thought hopefully after we'd had the conversation.

I didn't give those wonderful women nearly enough credit. Within days, they had Evan convinced that while it's nice to colour in the lines, it's equally fantastic to find creative ways to fill the spaces on colouring sheets. A shirt could be red, they pointed out, but it also could be plaid or rainbow or covered with little tiny hearts. Suddenly, instead of meticulously accurate renditions of lifelike objects, they've got him filling his sheets with striped balloons and polkadotted hats and all sorts of other whimsical creations.

Couldn't you just kiss these teachers for their brilliance? The new plan is working for everyone. Evan's teachers are happy because work which used to take him hours to complete is now getting finished on the same timeline as his classmates' projects. I am happy because Evan is getting a chance to put a creative spin on monotonous classwork and he's taking a step away from the perfectionist tendencies which have driven him so crazy as of late. And Evan is happy because he's got a brand new way to enjoy his beloved colouring sheets.

The differences between English and American school systems be damned. The other kind of difference -- the kind that skillful teachers can make in the life of a child -- is the only one which truly counts.

Have pumpkins, will travel

2007-10-31T20:54:00.001Z

Halloween is historically not an English holiday. There is trick-or-treating to be found, but it is never a sure thing... hardly the slam dunk door-to-door sugarfest one finds in the States.

And so tonight, we faced the annual question: can a magical purple wizard...

....and a not-so-wicked witch

.... find the magic elixir* they seek in the high streets and back alleys of Hampstead?

Suffice to say 2007 was a success.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

*high fructose corn syrup, of course...

Enfermo

2007-10-27T10:11:00.000Z

We are standing in a farmacia, relieved to have finally found one that is open during siesta hours. The pharmacist is squinting at the fine print on a container of children's fever reducer as Paul uses his Blackberry to try to convert Evan's weight from pounds to kilograms. "You'll need forty drops of this," the pharmacist says finally, handing me a bottle of red liquid. "Forty?" I repeat incredulously. "Yes," he replies, squinting at the package insert again a bit uncertainly. "Four zero." I shake my head. There is no way that I am giving my child 40 drops of a medication that has warning labels I cannot even read. "What are our other options," I ask. "Surely Spanish 3 year olds do not take 40 drops of this medication every time they get a fever." He shrugs, pulls out a box of adult pain relievers. "You could break one of these tablets in half and maybe grind it up..." Paul seems to think this is the better option. I watch him purchasing the box of medication, knowing that there is not a shot in hell that I'm giving my child any of this stuff without a more credible explanation of what the dosage should be. We will simply have to do a better job of rationing the few Children's Tylenol tablets I have left in my toiletries bag. I reach down to feel Evan's forehead for the millionth time and discover that he has fallen asleep in his stroller again while we were talking to the pharmacist. He feels warm, but not burning up -- maybe 101 or so? I look at Paul, shrug. "I guess we should let him sleep for now." Julia looks hopeful. "Does this mean we can go to the Picasso museum?" she asks. "Might as well," Paul replies. We spend the next hour or so exploring the museum with Julia while Evan dozes feverishly. As we emerge from the building, a postcard of Julia's favorite painting clutched in her hand, Evan wakes up. He is delighted to discover that he's just in time for ice cream. But halfway through his cone of chocolate gelato, he announces that he's done. I sigh as I look for a bin to throw away the remains of his snack. If the kid isn't finishing his ice cream, he's clearly pretty sick...

It was bound to happen eventually. In truth, the fact that we made it through a full year of dragging our young kids around Europe before anyone got ill on a trip was probably more fortunate and unlikely than we realized. Our luck ran out this week in Barcelona. Evan developed a fever on the flight over which plagued him the whole time we were there. With few other symptoms and a decent capacity to bounce back each time he got a dose of our hoarded Tylenol stash, it hardly seemed necessary to hightail it back to London immediately. But clearly we couldn't keep up a frantic sightseeing pace either. And so we persevered, trying to strike a balance between "once in a lifetime trip to a heady and intoxicating city" and "responsibility to our sick kid." An extra beer at a beach bar while Evan dozed and Julia played in the sand. A simple pasta dinner prepared in the hotel room as the tapas bars twinkled invitingly out of reach six stories below. La Sagrada Familia, but not Parc Guell. The Barri Gotic, but not Montjuic. I suppose that we make compromises every time we travel with children anyway; this trip, we just made more than usual.

Despite the fact that Evan insisted all week that his ears did not hurt at all, when we finally returned to London and headed straight for the doctor's office, his left eardrum literally burst right in front of her and his mysterious fever was suddenly explained. Now on antibiotics, he's cheerfully telling anyone who'll listen about his "great" trip to Barcelona and Julia is filling postcard after postcard with descriptions of all the fun things she saw and did on our trip. That we did not have all of the adventures I'd hoped for hardly seems to matter in hindsight -- the kids had fun, the pictures are decent and everyone's healthy in time to return to school tomorrow. As for all of the "must sees" on my Barcelona checklist that remain unseen? I guess they just mean that Barcelona will have to be a "twice in a lifetime" destination for us. I won't complain.

Second (or 102nd) guessing the school thing

2007-10-16T08:23:00.000Z

"You may still have issues with the English educational system," a friend who knows me well remarked the other day as we watched our children chase each other around the playground, "but your children were made for it." I looked at my kids, at quiet Julia who thrives on structure and academic stimulation and at charming Evan whose innate politeness and desire to please have completely endeared him to his teachers here. "I know," I sighed.

For the most part, I've reconciled myself to the way my children are being educated here in London. It's still hard to set aside my long held belief that a foundation of free-form play, experimentation and creativity is far more important than early exposure to traditional academics, but I'm willing at this point to at least acknowledge that my way is not the only way that works. My children have truly never been happier, and anything that makes my children this excited and motivated and downright gleeful cannot be all bad. I've brought them to London and inserted them into this educational system, I remind myself frequently, and now it's important to support them here. The place where I draw the line -- the one exception which I cannot bring myself to enthusiastically endorse -- is Evan's obsessive quest for coloring perfection.

Evan is an excellent colorer-in. (Yes, I know this is not a real word. In Evan's world, it is, though, and this is his story.) He adores coloring sheets and can spend hours a day on them, and the end results are spectacularly well done, more so than anything Julia can produce, even. I must admit that I prefer his quirky happy face people and other original drawings to his painstakingly neat coloring sheets, but he is all about the latter and I am generally all about whatever makes my kids happy. If Evan wants to print Sesame Street and Little Einsteins coloring pages off the web and spend his afternoons happily creating perfect color-accurate replicas of his beloved characters, who am I to argue?

an Evan masterpiece, circa August, 2007

I know that Evan gets a lot of positive reinforcement at school for his careful coloring. In general, the art projects which Evan brings home from school are gorgeous and impressive, but they inevitably follow a strict, teacher-dictated structure. Evan's projects always look just like the teacher's model and he receives high praise for his artistic abilities, so he's clearly internalized the whole idea that there is a right way and a wrong way to "do" art. I'm thrilled that Evan gets so many opportunities to work with interesting art supplies at school and I'm happy that he's so proud of the projects he produces. But I'm less delighted with the uniformity of the children's work and I'm downright concerned about the effect this is all having on Evan in general. Because suddenly, my artistic little boy who loves coloring sheets is crumpling them up and bursting into hysterical tears if his marker strays even a millimeter outside the lines. All of the joy seems to have gone out of coloring for him in his quest for perfection and his rigid and unrealistic expectations of himself.

"Evan, what's wrong?" I asked yesterday as he burst into tears and pushed aside yet another coloring sheet. "I colored outside the lines," he wailed.

I studied the sheet. It looked pretty darn carefully drawn to me. "I don't even see it, Evan."

the source of all the hysteria

"There," he moaned, pointing at a nearly microscopic bit of red in a corner of Elmo's eyes. "It's ruined!" The tears began to flow even harder. "I need to print another one. I can do better."

"Evan, this looks fine to me," I soothed him. "You've clearly been doing very careful work and it shows. I can scarcely even see the red in Elmo's eye. But if you're really upset about it, why not make the eyes red, too?"

Evan looked at me scornfully. "Elmo's eyes are WHITE," he replied emphatically. "Usually they are," I agreed. "But why not make a creatively colored Elmo this time? Why don't we color a silly Elmo with crazy colors?" My only response was an angry head shake and some more tears.

"OK, coloring pages are clearly not working right now," I replied. "How about we get out some plain white paper and you can draw your own Elmo and color him in any way you want?" No response. "We could do something even more fun," I tried again. "How about a really messy, abstract art project instead of something representational?" Evan sniffed mightily. "No thanks," he replied. "I just want to be by myself for a while."

Are self-flagellating tantrums like this, which happen more frequently than I'd like to admit, entirely the fault of Evan's current educational situation? Certainly not. This quest for perfection and artistic drive is something that's innate in my child. Most of his classmates are gleefully scribbling across the coloring pages they find in the classroom despite the teachers' constant reminders to try to stay within the lines. This is my own kid's personal craziness. But I can't help but believe that there is something about the fact that they're even giving those reminders and something about those pretty art projects that need to be done the "right" way which feeds into Evan's perfectionist tendencies. At the very least, it's not helping.

In the reminders to "do your best" which Evan gets at school, Evan seems to hear "I can do better." And just as he beats himself up when he isn't proud of his work, so do I beat myself up when I watch him suffer this way. I'm trying to do my best for my children here, trying to trust in the educational system and to believe that I'm doing the right thing sending my kids to this school. But when my 3 1/2 year old is crying hysterically because he didn't color in the lines carefully enough? Surely I can do better for him.

This English custom takes the cake

2007-10-13T18:24:00.000Z

All of Julia's classmates have birthdays which fall between September and January, and as a result we are heavily into birthday party season around here these days. Julia came home from yet another party this afternoon with a butterfly painted on her face, sugar coursing through her veins and a goody bag which contained all of the usual suspects: a hair clip, some stickers, generic play dough, a hairbrush/mirror set and a smushed up slice of cake wrapped up in a napkin.

The first time that a piece of birthday cake made its way home to us in a goody bag this way, I was genuinely puzzled. Had the party gotten out of hand? Had the planned itinerary of birthday activities and games been too ambitious? Perhaps there was so much leftover cake that they were trying to get rid of it in any way that they could? Clearly, something must have gone wrong if the cake had not been consumed during the party as it should have been. "That poor party host," I thought, as I looked for an opportune moment to unobtrusively toss the unappetizing mess of smeared icing and crumbly cake into the bin.

Now that I am a veteran of the English birthday party circuit, I know better. I understand now that cake is rarely served at birthday parties here. I know that after the birthday child blows out the candles to much fanfare, the beautiful confection that no doubt cost a fortune will be sliced up and parceled out into unappetizing napkin-wrapped take home parcels.

What I don't understand... is why.

Going postal

2007-10-09T12:14:00.000Z

I had a dream the other night that I arrived home after a long journey. "Home" could mean any number of locations for me right now, I suppose, caught as I am between permanent addresses at the moment. My subconscious apparently decided to circumvent all of that confusion by taking me back to my childhood home, a house I've neither seen nor entered in over a dozen years now. I pulled the car into the driveway, went to the mailbox to retrieve the mail, and then entered the house, where I spread all of the mail out on the wall unit in the living room and proceeded to sort through it. That was it, the whole dream, and yet I woke from it deeply content and immensely satisfied.

I suppose that dream analysts could find significance in nearly every detail of that dream, from my subconscious choice of homes to the orderly way I sorted the envelopes and the happiness I found in examining all of that communication from the outside world. But in truth, I think I was just expressing my inner frustration over the postal strike that's been going on here in the UK for the past week.

I am currently waiting for no less than 6 packages, among them "Grammy original" hand knit sweaters for my children, the perfect pair of replacement black boots (gleefully sourced on Ebay-US after I walked right through the sole of my first pair), Halloween costumes for both kids (thank you, Ebay-UK), those fabulous Gap elastic waist jeans in a size 4T (hand-me-downs which probably cost more to mail than they would have to purchase, but I can't find them here, dammit) and a mystery package from a friend who recently left London to move back to Texas. I can't remember when I last had such a bounty of riches winging its way to my doorstep. Alas, I still don't have any such riches winging their way to my doorstep. Instead, they are all languishing in some warehouse somewhere while the postal workers of this country battle it out for better pay and working conditions. I am all for better pay and working conditions for postal workers, of course. I'm just equally in favor of receiving my mail.

Would this happen in the States? I somehow doubt it -- and not just because I've begun to romanticize the American way of life a bit. It's just that people in the US would freak out if they didn't get any mail for a week and the dispute would be settled quickly before angry mobs stormed their local post offices in search of their Pottery Barn catalogs. Not in the UK, though. Here, people shrug and soldier on. Stiff upper lip, you know. And I'm trying to have one, truly I am. But clearly I'm still a soft American at heart. Because with each day that passes with nary a piece of junk mail to grace my dusty mail slot? Well, it's hard not to let that lip quiver a bit.

Lost and found

2007-10-02T09:08:00.000Z

I cried when Julia's first tooth came in. She was 5 months old and I wasn't expecting to see pearly whites in her mouth so soon. But one day, her gummy grin revealed a flash of white and as I rubbed it gently in disbelief, she gleefully nibbled on my finger. From then on, Julia would never look the same, I knew; one by one, her teeth were going to continue to push up and alter the entire shape and appearance of her face. And so I cried for what was lost: for the baby Julia who was suddenly gone, evolving right in front of my eyes into a child with a toothy grin. I just wasn't quite ready to let that baby stage go.

Silly and sentimental, those tears were. Postpartum hormones and the raw emotion of new parenthood, dripping foolishly from my eyes like sap from a tree. I just don't cry like that these days. My kids still amaze and delight me, of course, but not with the same overwhelming intensity as in the early days of their lives. They fill me with plenty of emotion -- frustration and pride and contentment and bewilderment, all in equal parts -- but none of it is as raw as that which I felt in their first few months, and I can't recall the last time either of them actually moved me to tears. My hormones and my footing as a parent are both far too stable for that now. I've got things under control.

So why, then, as that stretch of gum I'd not seen for nearly 5 1/2 years suddenly re-emerged yesterday, did I immediately burst into tears?

Lost: A small piece of white bone, so tiny that it's hard to believe it once dominated her whole mouth. A little blood (hers) and a few tears (mine). The face of early childhood.

Found: The next stage. A changed mouth which will soon change again (not to mention a new need to keep change on hand). And just a bit of raw emotion which I hadn't quite expected. I guess I'm still not quite ready to let my baby go.

Fun with language, part 3

2007-09-26T13:44:00.000Z

It happens to me at least 3 or 4 times a week. Julia will be happily telling me about her school day when her words suddenly stop me in my tracks. "Wait, your teacher is encouraging you to use what???" I ask her in sudden bewilderment. Each time she smiles patiently at me, as if I am a small, slightly daft child who needs remedial education. "Rubbers," she'll reply with a slightly exasperated laugh. "I've told you this a million times. We have to use rubbers so we don't make mistakes."

She'll get the exact same lesson back in the US someday, I imagine. But there, they'll call it Sex Ed, not Handwriting Practice.

Shall I natter on about this a bit more, then?

2007-09-25T10:17:00.000Z

Julia caught a ride home from a birthday party this past weekend with a friend. "I've never heard Julia talk so much before," her friend's mother smiled at me as she helped Julia out of the car. "Her accent is adorable!" Momentarily surprised, I very nearly told her that she had the wrong child. It's Evan who is sporting quite a strong -- and definitely adorable -- British accent these days. Julia, in contrast, abruptly dropped nearly all traces of her British accent after our trip back to the States last spring ("I'm American and that's how I want to sound," she declared with a sudden sense of national pride which has surprisingly not waned since). My confusion soon passed as I realized that of course, it was Julia's American pronunciations and expressions that sounded so cute to the British ear. Here, she's the one with the accent.

The fact that Julia's speech, while normal and unremarkable to me, struck her friend's mum as charmingly different was yet another reminder of the differences between American and British English which I wrote about last week. While Denzylle may be correct that I have overgeneralized somewhat in extending the speaking patterns I've noticed among the people I've met here to the entire British population, I think few would argue that there are decidedly quite a few differences between the ways English is spoken in our countries. I still maintain that those differences include how words are put together every bit as much as how they are pronounced.

I suspect that Mobile Em may have been right on the money, however, when she suggested that my examples of verbs followed by prepositions simply indicate differences in word choice rather than actual errors, "wrong" as they sound to my ear. Thanks to Cami, therefore, for reminding me of one rule which is decidedly different; here, a group is always plural even if described as a single entity (i.e. "Waitrose do a lovely job"), whereas in American English, the entity is always singular even if it represents the group as a whole ("Watirose does a lovely job").

For those of you left wondering (Iota), yes, the problem with D was the lack of a question mark; the "please can you" construction is decidedly British (Americans would likely say "would you please" or "could you please"), but I don't think there's anything technically wrong with the sentence by American standards other than the punctuation. And for what it's worth, I hear "please can you" statements come out of Evan's mouth regularly these days and while I'll confess it sets my teeth on edge a teeny tiny bit sometimes, I'm generally (to steal yet another non-American expression) not bothered. Hell, I'm just grateful that someone's teaching him to say please. Of all my over generalizations about the British way of life, the extra emphasis on politeness is my absolute favorite. (I trust that my self mockery translates equally well into both British and American English here?)

I hold these truths to be self-evident (but the British appear to disagree)

2007-09-20T09:02:00.000Z

Here's a little pop quiz for all you grammarians out there. Pay close attention to prepositions and punctuation. Which of the following sentences are correct?

A) I live in London Road.
B) I need to be there for 11:00.
C) They should arrive Wednesday next.
D) Please can you help me with this.
E) I need to chat to you about something.
F) none of the above
G) all of the above

The answer to this quiz, I've discovered, is completely dependent on whether you are American or British. To an American ear, it is clearly F. Not only is each and every one of these sentences wrong, each of them (if you are a grammar nut like me) is wrong in a drag-your-fingernails-slowly-and-painfully-down-the chalkboard kind of way. And yet, here the answer appears to be a resounding "why are you asking me such silly questions" G.

I not only hear people structure their sentences like the ones above every day, I also read this kind of language in advertisements and other presumably edited for accuracy documents with regularity. Either no one pays attention to any grammatical rules whatsoever in this country or the rules are simply different. As my British friends and acquaintances strike me as intelligent, worldly people in every way other than their cringe-worthy (to my ear) grammar, I am forced to assume that it is the latter.

I have always thought grammar to be one of those things that is pretty darn black and white. Either you've said it right or you haven't, and I must admit to a terrible snobbery when it comes to the opinion I form of anyone who says it wrong with any regularity. And yet now it appears that the rules which I have always endeavored to abide with such devotion are actually not so invariable after all, at least not once one leaves American soil.

This leaves me in a tight spot, I must say. Either I adapt to a new set of standards which sound uneducated to my American-educated ear or I continue to say things my way, which -- now that I think about it -- almost certainly must sound equally incorrect (and probably just plain dumb) to the British public. Ouch. So what's a grammatically conscious displaced American to do? Good question... I'll have to think on ~~about~~ on about it for a bit.

Homeschooling the holidays

2007-09-13T11:44:00.000Z

One of the first things that we did when we arrived in the U.K. last year was to purchase a mobile phone. The inexpensive pay-as-you-go clunker which we selected had few options or accessories (though it did a perfectly serviceable job of enabling us to call and be called). Its one distinguishing characteristic was its ring tone -- a tinny, scarcely recognizable rendition of REM's 1991 hit "Losing My Religion." It was, though I didn't realize it at the time, an apt theme song for my tenure in this country.

Judaism played a big role in my life and in the lives of my children in the U.S. As an interfaith couple, Paul and I have always struggled a bit to find the right religious balance in our lives, but our kids -- whom we are raising Jewish -- never lacked for Judaic identity and influence. Temple preschool, Tot Shabbat, holidays at Grandma and Grandpa's, even lighting the Sabbath candles each week were all a regular part of their existence. We were part of a Jewish community in the States and that, in hindsight, made it awfully easy to be Jewish.

In direct contrast, our London lifestyle has proved to be an almost entirely secular experience. Without a built in community and classroom reinforcement, my kids' Jewish identity seems to disappear a little bit more with every passing month. Joining a synagogue when we're only here for a short time seemed unnecessary, but I did originally figure that I could easily keep my kids' religious education up on my own. I hunted down challah on Friday evenings for the first few months, making sure to say the prayers with my kids. But life got busy, and without the preschool influence and the social aspect of the holidays to keep my kids engaged, the whole Judaism thing has really fallen by the wayside for us far more than I'd anticipated. The fact that we are Jewish is just not a daily factor in our lives here.

Today is not just any day, however. Today is Rosh Hashanah -- the Jewish new year -- one of the holiest days of the year. While I've been able to forgo religious commitment and connection most of the time, today it weighs heavy on me that my children and I are not in synagogue. (I did look into obtaining high holiday tickets, but with no local worship options, the prospect of traveling a long distance via public transportation to pray with a community of strangers felt somewhat less than appealing.) The kicker came when I announced a few days ago that Rosh Hashanah was fast approaching. "What's Rosh Hashanah?" my formerly Jewish educated children asked. I have to admit, I kind of freaked out.

And so, today, we have had a non-traditional holiday around here. I kept my children home from school to mark the occasion as a family, and promptly at 9:30 this morning, we all sat down at the kitchen table to figure out just what this Rosh Hashanah thing is and why it is relevant in our lives. Using the dozen-or-so page booklets which I'd created for each child using web-based resources, we read about the holiday and its meanings. The kids colored pictures of shofars while we listened to the sounds of the shofar blast online. They completed mazes and word hunts and more coloring sheets to reinforce key Rosh Hashanah themes. While we snacked on apples and challah dipped in honey, children's holiday music played in the background (thank you, World Wide Web) and the kids and I soon joined in. Julia made some resolutions. Both kids did a craft project. And finally, everyone watched a lovely film with a moral which teaches the importance of being a good person. (OK, it was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But seriously? Filling a whole day with enriching and meaningful activities for the 3-5 year old set is HARD.)

God willing, this will be the only Rosh Hashanah that I ever spend at home in sweats and fuzzy bedroom slippers. I sorely felt the absence of family and friends and a Jewish community today (though I haven't necessarily missed the fight for a parking spot near the temple or the hunt for high holiday-appropriate attire). I look forward to returning to familiar prayers and shared prayerbooks in over-filled sanctuaries next year. But by the same token, there was something really special about the way we spent Rosh Hashanah today. I had fun teaching my kids about their heritage, and their enthusiasm for the lesson and activities was really gratifying. Today, we came a little closer together as a family and we celebrated something that plays an important role in who we are. There are worse ways to start a new year.

School daze

2007-09-11T08:41:00.000Z

Thanks to all of you who've gotten in touch to check on Evan... despite the pathetic bend of his shoulders on his first morning of school, he's actually had a relatively pain-free school transition thus far. I know my son better than to get my hopes up after a few good drop off days, but he hasn't cried or clung to me since that first morning (which is a dramatic improvement over last year when he routinely wailed each time I left him, only to settle happily into the school day as soon as he was good and certain that I was out of manipulatable earshot).

Evan completely adores his new teachers, his new classroom and pretty much every single thing he's done in school to date, to the point that he keeps up a running commentary about all things school-related from the second I pick him up at school until long after his head hits the pillow at night. ("And then, on Round FOUR of Freeze Dance, someone moved her elbow. I'm not sure who that someone was. It was a girl, though. I don't know all of the girls yet. There are way too many girls in my class. There should be more boys. And it wasn't fair, because when the girls coloured in their bears for the classroom wall, their bears had ballerina outfits on and the boys' bears were just boring old bears. I like colouring in, but I didn't want a boring old bear. I wanted to... Mummy? Mummy? Are you LISTENING to me, Mummy?") So, Evan. Yeah. Completely fine. And, uh, pretty darn British these days.

As for Julia, she is also utterly entranced by the magic of Year One. She adores her new teacher (as do I -- my kids clearly pulled the cream of the crop in teacher assignments this year), is excited about being back in school with her friends and is overjoyed to be learning again. Having seen her curriculum for the coming year, I must confess to being a bit jealous... she'll be tracing changes to homes both architecturally and internally in her History unit and weaving together natural materials to learn about texture in her Art unit and identifying sources of light in Science and creating an improved playground plan which she'll map out in Georgraphy and... I think I pretty much want to go back to school and be in Miss B's class, truth be told.

Fortunately, I seem to be getting the full curriculum second hand, at least for now. Evan gets 3 hours and 20 minutes of uninterrupted monologue time between the end of his school day and Julia's before he has to do battle with his sister, who appears similarly obsessed with sharing every second of the wondrous new experience that is Year One with me. ("We took the coach to Games today and Eve was my parter. Some kids did it wrong and didn't share the window seat, but Eve and I did it just right. First she sat in the window seat and then I did. We talked about a lot of things on the coach but I can't tell you about any of them because they're secrets. But I can tell you a secret about school. Do you know what we did today? We had Brain Gym. Do you know what Brain Gym is? It's exercise for your MIND! Isn't that silly? And tomorrow, we have real Gym and that means we get to go in the little door, and... Mom? Mom? Are you LISTENING to me, Mom?")

So everyone is off to a happy start to the school year and everyone is learning new things. Evan is learning about gender differences, apparently, and Julia is learning about secrets. And me? I'm learning how to get us all up and out of the house on time again. I'm deciphering Julia's complicated schedule of track suit days and uniform days (we received, I kid you not, a three page memo about what the kids are supposed to wear to school each day. Whatever happened to the school uniform eliminating the need to think in the mornings? Every day has a different set of requirements, all of which I expect to screw up on a regular basis. Julia appears to share this lack of confidence in me, as she's been consulting the memo "just to make sure" when I hand her a pile of clothes each morning). I'm attempting to keep track of Julia's show and tell needs and Evan's "bring in something red" assignments. I'm trying to get someone in the school office to get back to me about the fact that my daughter has eaten nothing but bread and water for lunch to date. And I'm struggling to figure out how to piece together a bit of time for myself in between a full schedule of school runs and the endless carting of children to other enriching activities (our fall schedule sounded great on paper, but is turning out to be too closely timed to allow for silly little necessities like getting from Point A to Point B). How this differs from what our lives would have been like in American suburbia, I have no idea. Perhaps that's the real lesson here. When you've got school age kids and the school year is in session, it pretty much ceases to matter where on Earth you actually are. So much for the exotic expat experience. But how lovely to know that the joys and drudgery of motherhood are universal, no?

The flip side of freedom (a newly unencumbered mother's limerick)

2007-09-07T08:46:00.000Z

I grinned as I set off alone
But that smile soon turned to a groan
For to cart all my loot
With no pushchair boot
Made me mourn how my children had grown

The end of the beginning and the beginning of the end

2007-09-06T09:02:00.000Z

There were confident smiles...
And shaky tears...
(Transition is never easy, you know.)
But in the end, they scooted off to school...
...and thus began our second -- and final -- year in London.

The apple

2007-09-05T12:49:00.001Z

Today is one of those days that I have been looking forward to with equal parts of anticipation and dread since before I even gave birth to Julia. Today is my baby girl's first day of kindergarten.

She won't be there, of course. She's 3700 miles away from the classic brick building that I used to picture her marching proudly into, backpack and lunch box in hand. While her peers back home enter the hallowed halls of the "big kid school" which we used to wave at every time we drove past it, she'll be playing with her younger brother today and enjoying her last day of summer holiday. Tomorrow, she'll follow a different back-to-school ritual, racing down a London street on her scooter and completely ignoring my pleas not to mess up the perfect pleats of her starched uniform until she's at least entered the school building. She'll walk into her new classroom an experienced Year One student, not a tentative kindergartener. She'll greet old friends and settle easily back into the rhythm and routine of the school day, secure in the knowledge that she's done this all before already. I won't cry or feel wistful as I see her off; after all, I've done this before, too.

Julia will never have all of the pomp and circumstance of an American child's first day of kindergarten. The timing of our move and the difference in academic age guidelines inadvertently robbed me of my parental right to celebrate and mourn this rite of passage and the passage of time. I'm certain that the first day of a British child's reception year is an equally bittersweet milestone here, but we somehow missed even that experience, arriving here as we did a week into the school year last September. There was a scramble to find a school, a flat, an overpriced uniform. When the pieces all finally fell together, we breathed a sigh of relief and hurriedly dropped Julia at her new school before racing to meet the estate agent and pick up the keys to our new home. That she was embarking on a new stage in her academic career felt far less notable than the fact that we had managed to find her a school place at all. By the time we knew what had hit us, Julia had already adjusted and the milestone was behind us. Too late by then to cry tears of pride and wonder at how the time had flown.

There is a tradition in our New Jersey hometown that all incoming kindergarteners receive wooden apples with their names on them at orientation. They wear these apples around their necks on the first day that they enter school, and then again over their graduation gowns on the day they leave the system 13 years later. I've loved the idea of that tradition since the first time I heard of it... loved what it signified about small town living and loved that we were raising our kids in a community which fostered these kinds of traditions. I couldn't wait to see Julia get that apple at 5, smiled to envision her wearing it again at 18.

Things rarely work out the way we expect that they will, and I don't have a kindergartener with an apple around her neck today. Despite the fact that Julia was born into that community and will likely live the majority of her years there, I won't have an apple-adorned high school graduate 13 years from now. Those images which I so looked forward to will never exist except in my imagination.

This London experience is worth far more than a wooden apple, of course. Instead of the continuity an apple's presence on Julia's graduation gown would have signified for me, its absence will be a reminder of our time here and the unexpected and special path our lives took during these years. I'm sure that the sight of her unadorned gown will be every bit as powerful at symbol for me as the apple would have been. And truly, I wouldn't want it any other way, wouldn't wish these years away for all the apples in America.

But just for today, I'm felling a little bittersweet about the life that we're not living and the things that we've sacrificed for what we now have. I'm picturing all of Julia's American friends proudly marching off to school for the first time with their apples around their necks. I'm picturing the photo which I always assumed I'd take of a 5 year old Julia on the front step of our house early one September morning. And I'm wishing that I had one of those silly apples to drape over Julia's British school uniform tomorrow, if only for the picture that I'll take on the front stoop which isn't narrow of the house that isn't yellow on the first day of the 2007-2008 school year.

Well, colour me British

2007-09-02T14:23:00.000Z

So, uh, guess what I ordered when we went out to dinner at yet another gastropub on Friday night? You betcha. I asked for the fil-let. And I did it with a straight face, no less.

Not only that, but I somehow managed to convince a dining partner (one of our American house guests) to order his steak the same way.

My assimilation programme is apparently now complete.

No vacancy

2007-08-29T16:18:00.000Z

My father in law, who has been here visiting for the past five days, left at 8:00 this morning. His sheets were still warm and his towel still wet as I swept them up and tossed them into the washing machine the second the door shut behind him. Two hours later, I found myself offering more cups of coffee to our newest set of travel worn guests, trying to forestall their need to shower and rest until I could get their linens tumbled dry.

The friends who arrived this morning with their two kids in tow are some of our favorite people, and all four of us were particularly excited about their arrival. We're looking forward to being their London hosts through this weekend. But they're also the third set of house guests we've hosted in the past two weeks, and as much fun as their visit is bound to be, I'm getting close to my limit of gracious hostess tricks.

"Come and visit us in London," we told friends and family. We meant it, and we're incredibly touched and excited that so many people have taken us up on our offer. Visitors bring a bit of comfort and familiarity from home, and their presence here is a powerful reminder of all that we love about our life in the States. At the same time, we take a certain pride in our life here by now, and sharing it with people we care about is a true pleasure for us. We are more than happy to serve as a London B&B for any and all who wish to visit us here. Truly. But... did everyone have to take us up on our hospitality offer at once?

The girl is mine

2007-08-21T18:29:00.000Z

It's been a long day and I'm tired and not 100% on my game. So when I instruct Evan for the 50th time to find and put on his clothing after he's taken a bath, I'm not really thinking about my words. I mean to say "Evan, where is your underwear," but somewhere along the way, I forget my train of thought and end up coming out with the grammatically cringe-worthy "Evan, where is your underpants?"

Julia doesn't miss a beat. "Where ARE your underpants," she corrects me instantly. The response is so automatic that she doesn't seem to even realize she's said it.

I smile as I run off in pursuit of my still unclad son. I may not be able to influence one of my children to dress himself with any degree of consistency, but I've clearly had an impact on the other one.

So you're thinking of living in London

2007-08-19T12:44:00.000Z

I get emails on a somewhat regular basis from Americans who are thinking of moving to London. They've found my blog via a Google search or a link from an expat site and they're looking for advice or information or maybe just some kind of a cosmic sign that will tell them whether they should pack their bags or abandon this silly idea of living abroad.

I recognize these people because they are me -- or at least the me who spent all of last summer trolling the web for real estate listings and school information and practical advice about an undertaking like moving to London. When we were in the process of making our move, I reached out to anyone and everyone I could find who could give me some sense of what it would really be like to live here. The more people who told me what had worked or not worked for them, I figured, the better chance I had of making this work for us.

I'm incredibly grateful to the strangers who were willing to take the time to answer my emails and my phone calls and my endless stream of questions. Some of them eventually became my friends and others were simply short term correspondents, but all of them impressed me with their willingness to help out someone who they didn't even know. "I've been there," every one of them told me. That sounded a little simplistic to me then, but I get it now. It is because of the difference that all of those people made in my own move that I am always willing to return those "I hate to bother you, but..." emails which show up in my inbox periodically. What goes around comes around, and now it's my turn to be generous with my knowledge and experience.

Sometimes, however, I feel like I'm answering the same questions over and over again (probably because I am!). So if you're thinking of moving to London and you're looking for some information, here are a few links in which I may have already said what you want to know.

My family moved to northwest London in September of 2006. You can read about our experience with renting and furnishing a flat here and if you're curious about the place we ended up renting, you can see pictures of the outside and inside of our flat on the blog as well. We love the area we've settled in and feel fortunate to call it home, but I must admit that there's a flip side to our expat housing stipend that I hadn't anticipated which still sometimes throws me for a bit of a loop.

If you're a parent wondering about how your kids will fare in London, I've documented my early impressions of British education here and my thoughts about the differences between American and British children here and you can start brushing up on the British version of nursery rhymes here. My kids are relatively young, but on the whole, I've found them to be remarkably adaptable... often more so than me.

If you're interested in how your household might run over here, you might want to read up on the things we eat here or our laundry challenges. If there are certain American items that you simply can't live without, you'll certainly want to be forewarned about the wrong way to get them here. And you can also read about how we solved the car dilemma (though I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that despite my bravado when I wrote that post, it's my husband who does all of our car club driving these days... I'm still too damn chicken to get behind the wheel).

I was pretty lost and overwhelmed when we first arrived in London a year ago. I floundered for a while, wondering if this place would ever feel like home. And now it does... not a forever kind of home, but a place where I'm comfortable and happy and one that I know will always be a part of me. I love living in London and I wholeheartedly recommend this experience to anyone who has the opportunity to do something similar.

This is a personal blog. It's filled with stories about my kids and recaps of our travels and musings about life which are probably not interesting to anyone other than me. I'm certainly no expert on expatriation or life in London and I only know the ins and outs of my own small section of this huge city with any degree of confidence. But if you know where to look in my archives, you can get a decent sense of this one family's London experience. If you showed up here hunting for that kind of information, I hope that you found some of what you were looking for. And I hope that your London experience will be every bit as life-altering and wonderful as our is proving to be.

Cheers!

The Somewhere Over The Pondies

2007-08-13T15:18:00.000Z

No less than four months ago, Liesl over at Come, Mommy tagged me for the Real Moms meme. The idea of the meme was cute; participating bloggers were supposed to write about something they find themselves doing as real moms -- presumably to dispel some of the need for perfectionism and increase the feeling of solidarity among parents. I love reading about Liesl's family's exploits in my home state and appreciated the shout out from her in this post. I didn't mean to blow it off per se. But I've never been a huge fan of memes and awards and other such Internet chain letters, and so I just... set it aside for a while. (Ahem.) A long while.

Around the same time, Dana of Angst du Jour fame very thoughtfully presented me with a Thinking Blogger Award. I was touched (and immediately emailed her to say so); Dana's one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking people I've ever come across in my ever-expanding blogging network, and this award meant a lot coming from her. As much as any "blog award" could mean, of course... I mean, we're essentially talking about a big ole' Web game of tag and "no, but you're so great" here, right? So yeah, I said thanks -- and I meant it -- but I didn't rush to pass the award on. (Sorry, Dana!)

Fast forward a few months to July, when Iota of Not Wrong, Just Different bestowed the Rockin' Blogger Award upon me. Iota's one of my very favorite bloggers at the moment; her experiences as a British expat in the U.S. never cease to make me smile, and her hybrid of American and British spellings and expressions reads like my own mind at work. I love her writing, love her impressions of American life... it's a big fat love-fest. How flattering to see that she felt the same way. I should really acknowledge that, huh? Except, see above.

Finally this week, my fellow London expat blogger Amanda of London Southern Belle awarded me with the Nice Matters Award. Now they've clearly thought of everything (whomever "they" might be), right? The Nice Matters award??? But Amanda's a talented writer whose work I really enjoy and it was sweet of her to think of me and even sweeter of her to consider me nice when I'm clearly a bit of a snarky bitch at times and my God, how could I just leave all that niceness dangling there?

So.

As much as I enjoy blogging, I'm not much one for gratuitous reading or commenting on other people's blogs. There are a limited number of hours in the day, y'know? And there are a lot of blogs out there. So if I take the time to read and occasionally comment on your blog, that pretty much means I think your writing is good and your perspective is interesting. I think that you're a Thinking Blogger. I think that you're a Rockin' Blogger. And hell, I even think you're nice. So if you are so inclined, please help yourself to one of the pretty buttons below. You've earned 'em more than I have. And if you are not so inclined? Trust me, I won't be insulted...

And with that, Liesl, I hereby complete the meme you tagged me for so long ago that you've probably completely forgotten about it. Real Moms... we may break the rules a bit, but we eventually get the job done.

Funny at 3 (though less so a dozen years from now, I'm sure)

2007-08-07T09:05:00.000Z

We are at breakfast in our Stockholm hotel, a big smorgasboard affair offering abundant food spreads and yet precious little to eat. Evan is unbelievably squirmy, unable to sit still for more than two seconds. He has requested half a dozen food items, none of which he's eaten much of, and seems to be making eyes for even more delicacies which I am quite certain will go untouched.

"Evan, who are you?" I ask in mock exasperation as he uncharacteristically shifts in his seat for about the gazillionth time. Evan smiles with satisfaction as he reaches for his large mug of chocolate milk (no doubt the source of his fidgety behavior).

"I'm a drinking kind of man," he proclaims.

Stockholm: Ja!

2007-08-06T13:38:00.000Z

Here's a fun travel tip. If you really want to get to know a city, accidentally leave your stroller at home. Even if your 3 year old is a good sport in the airport and gamely keeps up the pace for a while, he's bound to lose it completely and demand a place where he can rest eventually. When this happens, you can frantically search online for local stroller dealers, try to communicate with non-English-speaking stroller vendors via phone (slowly speaking English with a heavy fake Swedish accent is less than effective, for the record), and then navigate the city's subway system and side streets in search of an inexpensive (ha!) buggy. By the time you've wheeled your "wait, we just paid how much and the wheels aren't even steady?" purchase out of that darling, overpriced little baby shop and back through the "isn't this charming... I could totally live here if only I were tall and blond and skinny and capable of pronouncing 82 consonants at once" area, you will feel OK about hightailing it back to the local tourist traps (where everything is easy and everyone speaks such nice English...).

Our little stroller snafu notwithstanding, we had a fabulous time in Sweden. Stockholm is truly a beautiful city. It's small enough that it can easily be learned in a short period of time, yet big enough that there's plenty to see and do. Everything is incredibly kid-friendly (with the possible exception of food offerings, which were a little dicey for my non-herring-appreciative offspring) and the proximity to all that water gives the city a relaxed, laid back feeling which we loved. I could feel myself instantly unwind in the archipelago, but then quickly adapted back into the faster pace of the city as soon as we hit dry land. Definitely a "something for everyone" destination (including my kids, who predictably gave Stockholm a big thumbs up as soon as they spotted their first ice cream stand).

I must confess, Sweden was never especially high on my mental "must see" itinerary before I started researching and planning this trip. In fact, I commented to my brother after our home furnishing extravaganza last fall that we could cross Sweden off the list now that we'd spent so much time in Ikea. I'm glad to have been talked out of this folly. Stockholm was everything we look for in a city break and more. I highly recommend nearly everything Swedish (even their furniture, which I must grudgingly admit is holding up reasonably well 11 months later). Everything, that is, except their umbrella strollers. If you go to Stockholm with young kids who are less than enthusiastic about hoofing it all over creation for hours on end, do yourself a favor and remember to bring your buggy. If you come to visit us in London, however, you can leave yours at home. We've got just the (slightly unsteady, but it gets the job done) loaner waiting here now. God knows it might as well get some more mileage for what we paid...

Photos are up on Flickr for those who want to see!

Beyond Epcot

2007-07-29T14:15:00.000Z

Last weekend, Paul and I left the kids in my mother and aunt's very capable hands and ventured off for an adults-only trip to Bruges. Our fabulous mini-holiday included exploring the picturesque Belgian city on bicycles, taking frequent refreshment breaks at quaint local watering holes, dining in style at a Michelin-starred restaurant and sleeping so late that we very nearly missed the exquisite champagne breakfast offered by our luxury hotel. In other words, we went out of our way to enjoy the kind of trip that we never, ever could have considered with our kids in tow. We had nearly forgotten how much fun it can be to travel in style, given how accustomed we have become to searching for kiddie menus and proximity to playgrounds, and we enjoyed our little sojourn into our pre-parenthood lifestyle immensely.

Paul consults the map, eager to locate our next beer stop

As much as we appreciated the time to vacation as adults, and as beautiful as Bruges was, there was something about the area which I found a little unsettling. I finally pinpointed the source of my complaint on our second day there as I watched the world go by from my vantage point in an outdoor cafe; there wasn't a single person walking by who not carrying a guidebook. Bruges is beautiful, yes (though in an "old world Europe" way that was starting to feel a little too familiar, coming as this trip did on the heels of our visit to Prague), but it's so touristy that there seems to be little in the way of real life there. The town has what I call the "Epcot Factor" -- it's completely darling, but nearly entirely devoid of anything not aimed directly at visitors -- so much so that it might as well be sitting in the middle of Orlando's Epcot Center rather than the Belgian countryside. Lots to see, lots to do, and every bit of it manufactured for our enjoyment and pleasure. I can't deny that the effect is lovely, but the artifice is a bit... well, artificial.

Check out those charming, quaint... tourists

Tomorrow, we'll be setting off on a week-long trip to Stockholm. When we tell people that we're visiting Sweden on our summer vacation, they tend to assume that we're from the area, or at least have family or friends to visit there. That's not the case. We chose Sweden for our next destination simply because we expect it to look nothing like any of the other European cities we've visited thus far in our travels, and we're ready for a change of pace. We're looking forward to a sparkling clean city featuring an eclectic mixture of modern and ancient, to pickled fish (OK, maybe not so much the pickled fish), to crisp lines and sparse decorations and to lots and lots of water surrounding us.

Having polished off the last of the Pippi books at breakfast the other day, Julia can't wait to visit Junbacken. Evan's looking forward to riding the ferries out to islands in the archipelago. We'll continue our tour of European royal residences at the Kungliga Slottet and we'll get a sense of maritime history at the Vasamuseet and an overview of Swedish culture at Skansen, all of which I'm genuinely excited about. But in addition to the obviously appealing tourist attractions of Stockholm, what I'm really hoping is that we'll also get to know the city itself a bit. As we get more and more travel under our belts, I find that I'm yearning for more than another Epcot experience. In between all of Stockholm's "must sees," I'm hoping that we'll gain at least a small sense during our visit of what everyday life is like there. Too much to ask in a week's vacation? I'll let you know next week.

A parenting dilemma

2007-07-27T13:04:00.001Z

When your 5 year old arrives at the breakfast table with book in hand and proceeds to absentmindedly consume her meal while continuing to devour her novel, do you:

A) Try to teach some tenuous table manners to your already-unmannered-enough offspring by insisting that books do not belong at the kitchen table. Encourage your child to chat with you about the book over breakfast and return to it when she has been excused.

B) Smile indulgently. Reading while eating is one of your own great pleasures and it's nice to see your child following in your footsteps. Who are you to discipline kids for behavior that you yourself engage in?

C) Revel so much in the unexpected and somewhat unprecedented silence of a dining companion who is lost in her book that you neglect to make any conscious parenting decisions whatsoever.

I think it's pretty obvious which way I went. The silence, it was golden, people. But I should probably choose option A or B next time, right? Somehow, the authoritative, decisive parenting thing always looked a lot easier when I wasn't the one who was expected to exert the authority or make the decisions....

The world is my oyster (card)*

2007-07-26T19:44:00.001Z

Evan had an appointment with his asthma specialist at 6:30 p.m. tonight. The doctor's office is almost halfway across the city, and I'd assumed that we would just take a cab there as usual. But I completely forgot to book the car early in the day, and when I finally thought to make the call at 5:30, I waited on hold for 20 minutes only to be told that there were no cars available. I now had 40 minutes until we were expected to arrive and no one was even answering the phone at my backup minicab company. Clearly, if I wanted to get us to this appointment, I was going to need to be a bit more proactive.

Out of the flat I ran, dragging my annoyed children, a stroller and my battered old A to Z street map. Studying the Tube map as we half-jogged, I steered us toward a local station. Wuss that I am, I had never actually taken my kids on the Tube without another adult before. This would have been uncharted territory even if I'd had half a clue where the heck I was going. No time to think about that now.

Despite our collective inexperience, the kids sensed and responded to my determination, and I was delighted to find that we were a well oiled travel machine. Down the steps with Evan's folded stroller on my back and both kids following cheerfully. Down the escalators with their hands in mine. Onto a train. Two stops and out. The line that I had intended to transfer to was experiencing delays, so I decisively announced that we'd just be walking from there. Up the escalators, hands in mine. Up the stairs, all in a line. Into the stroller went Evan as Julia and I commenced our half-jog down Marylebone Road. I turned my A to Z upside down (the only way I can follow a map is if it's facing the same way I am), consulted it briefly as we waited at intersections and forged ahead in what I prayed was the right direction.

We arrived at the doctor's office only 2 minutes past our allotted appointment time. The doctor saw us nearly immediately, pronounced Evan to be in good health and sent us on our way. I could have tried to call the cab company again and maybe lucked into a ride home, I suppose, but by now I was in the groove. Into a nearby station. One stop over and then a line change. Up and down stairs and escalators, kids by my side, stroller on my back, confidence soaring. Onto our last train, which would take us to a bus stop where we could catch a lift very nearly to our front door.

I beamed with pride as I looked down at my fellow travelers, who had handled the journey with such finesse and street savvy. Why had I waited so long to take my kids on the Tube by myself? This was a snap. They knew what to do and I knew what to do. We were Londoners now, through and through, I thought proudly.

And then, as the kids and I rode out the remainder of our journey, I happened to glance up at the Tube map posted above my head. I studied this detailed depiction, which had been designed to highlight only this section of the Underground's extensive network, for a moment and was pleased to have visual confirmation that we were headed in the right direction. I was just starting to look away when something caught my eye. And there, looking closer at the map, I saw my error. I had completed the walk-Tube-transfer-Tube-bus thing like a near pro, yes. But a true pro would probably have known that there was direct route from point A to point B which would have cut out more than half the steps in my journey. We had just done a giant half-circle around a short, straight shot.

Have I mastered this city? I was almost ready to think so for a few minutes this evening, but apparently I'm not there just yet. I'm damn close, though. And the high I got from my near mastery leads me to believe I'll close that gap in no time. I wonder where the kids and I should venture out to tomorrow...

* Am I dumbing things down too much or shedding some much-needed light on this post title if I mention that refillable Tube payment passes are known as Oyster Cards?

Housesick

2007-07-25T16:08:00.000Z

One of the more nerve wracking things about moving to London was the process of renting out our house in NJ. Becoming landlords and inviting strangers to live in our family home felt a little odd, but it was clearly the logical solution; having tenants in the house would cover our mortgage expenses and keep the property waiting for us when we returned, plus there would be someone keeping an eye out for burst pipes or pests or any of the multitude of other things that can go wrong in a house. We rejoiced when we found a terrific family (British expats, no less!) who were interested in living in our house, and when it rapidly became clear that they were dream tenants, we set out to make them so happy that they would never want to leave.

Unfortunately our plan backfired a bit, as I discovered a few months ago when perusing my hometown paper online (you can pretty much keep up with virtually all of the gossip in a town if you simply read the front page, real estate transaction notices, police beat and advertisements of the local rag on a semi-regular basis). Our tenants loved living in our town, all right. In fact, they loved it so much that they up and bought their own house there. They'd neglected to mention their impending move to us because they still had some renovations to deal with, but when confronted with the black and white evidence of their purchase, they had little choice but to admit that they'd be leaving us with no renters (or rental income) when their lease is up in September.

I've been trying very hard not to freak out about this over the past few months as we've re-listed our house and prayed for the perfect new tenants to magically appear. OK, so we made all of the decisions about where and how to live in London based on the assumption that we'd have monthly rent coming in from our house in the States. OK, so the real estate market has bottomed out in the past year and little is moving in our area for sale or rent. OK, so London is pretty much the worst place on earth that one could live if one suddenly found oneself cash poor. But I'm thousands of miles away from the house and I can't exactly obsessively polish the granite countertops until a rental genie magically pops out of them and offers us a contract, now can I? So I've tried to be all "what, me worry," "out of sight, out of mind" and "que sera sera" about the whole thing. With the exception of a few wide-awake-and-panicked-at-4am episodes, I've been surprisingly successful.

All of my ostrich-like behavior finally paid off this week in the form of new renters, who sound lovely and perfect (and, more importantly, have written us several large checks that pretty much ensure that they're at least good enough). I've breathed a huge sigh of relief that my travel-filled London lifestyle is not suddenly going to come to a screeching halt because of lack of funds and I've all but offered my realtor any future children I might bear in experessing my extreme gratitude for her assistance in getting this albatross off our backs for the next year. And yet...

As relieved as I am to have new tenants lined up, I must also admit a tinge of jealousy as they rejoice in their new rental home. Apparently, they're a young family with 3 kids only a bit younger than my own, and they're thrilled by the fenced in yard, delighted by the swingset and overjoyed about the friendly neighbors who will no doubt welcome them with open arms. "It's the perfect kid house," my realtor enthused. Yeah, tell me about it. I've raised a few there myself, or at least made a good start on the process. The more she went on about how great our house would be for these people, the more I found myself wishing that we had such wonderful living circumstances. Then came the kicker. "They say that those his and hers walk in closets in the master bedroom are going to save their marriage," she laughed. And I looked at the single cupboard which Paul and I share here and thought I might cry.

We said the same thing about those closets when we moved into that house. We were equally enthusiastic about the double sinks in the master bathroom, which I've always maintained are the key to a happy marriage. (A year into the shared-cupboard, shared-sink routine, I think they may be overstating the value of those closets just a tad, but I was most definitely not underestimating the value of that second sink.) We bought that house expecting to live happily ever after in it, and it's a little jarring to suddenly find someone else doing so instead. I'm incredibly grateful to have found renters for our house, of course (and yes, I know that what I'm getting in London is every bit as valuable as a second sink). But now that the problem is solved, I'm beginning to think that I envy our new tenants that house every bit as much as I recently feared that I'd never be able to unload it on someone.

I'm not homesick, really I'm not. But at the moment, I think I might just be a little housesick. (Closetsick? Sinksick? You get the idea.) Sick, aint it?

First I vanish and then I babble (which is worse?)

2007-07-24T11:59:00.000Z

We're nearly a week and a half into the summer holiday here, and I'm so disoriented and thrown off of my regular routine that it's taking a supreme effort for me to even figure out what day it is. Could I perhaps pretend not to realize that it's been nearly 2 weeks since my last blog post?

In lieu of blogging, I spent the past eight days enjoying house guests; my mother and aunt arrived last Monday for a visit which turned out to be the perfect bridge from school year to summer holiday. (I realize that the word "holiday" should in theory be superfluous here, but as July in England is turning out to resemble a dreary early spring far more than anything else, I feel the need to qualify the whole "summer" thing a bit. This is indeed our July and August school break. But it aint no summer.)

It is one of those blogging frustrations that the most things happen when there is the least time to write about them. I was much too busy enjoying my mom and aunt's visit to actually sit down and blog about it while it was in progress. Now that my house is once again quiet and all of those sheets and towels are washed, I'm a victim of too much time passed. I want to play catch up here, but instead I'm sitting here flummoxed by how to capture a few of the past week's memories for posterity without inadvertently writing the Not-So-Great British Novel in the process.

Definitely worth a few words was our trip to Covent Garden last week, where Julia inadvertently ended up the star of a street performer's show. He pulled her up to assist him with a trick and I guess he found her quirky combination of serious demeanor and willingness to play along engaging, because he ended up keeping her up there for the next 20 minutes or so. She was darling; intent and focused and poised while at the same time seemingly unaware of the growing audience of spectators cheering her on. Evan even got a small bit part in the action, which he enjoyed heartily. His deep belly chuckles (obviously the more expected response from a child onstage) were quite the amusing contrast with Julia's determined stoicism. My mother had her little video recorder with her, so we even have a portion of the performance recorded for posterity. My favorite part of the clip, however, has nothing to do with either of my kids. It is the spot where the recording begins abruptly, partway through the action, and you can hear my mother say "oh damn, I pressed the wrong button. I thought I was taping but I don't think I actually got any of that." And then you hear me moan "Moooooom...." There's nothing quite like capturing family dynamics at their finest for posterity.

I always see my kids and our surroundings with different eyes when we've got guests in town and this visit was no exception. Both kids proved themselves to be true city kids at last as they ran happily through town, stopping appropriately at street corners, pointing out important London landmarks (or at least those that are important to the 3-5 year old set) and conducting an exhaustive tour of playgrounds and ice cream distribution points. Evan taught my mom and aunt about the London bus system, Julia gleefully explored the National Gallery with her two enthusiastic visitors in tow and both kids were able to make a critical comparison between the crepe we enjoyed on the High Street and the ones they'd enjoyed in Paris (final analysis: they each got their own in Paris, and I made them share here, so the Paris crepes win because quantity is far more important than quality). It's still a little mind blowing to me that I suddenly have such worldly kids, but it was fun to watch my mother and aunt enjoy my family's new found Britishness.

My biggest regret about the time we're spending in London is the distance it puts between my kids and their extended family, and visits like this one are always a little bittersweet as we try stock up on memories by cramming huge doses of "regular life" into short periods of time. But I think we hit just the right combination of entertainment and comfortable companionship this time. When asked what their favorite part of the visit had been, my kids debated for a while between several London sightseeing outings before eventually deciding that baking cookies at home had actually been the most fun. I'm so grateful that they're still able to make that kind of everyday memory with their grandmother even during this anything-but-ordinary period in our lives.

It's always a little sad when guests leave. It's nice to have things back to normal, I suppose, but I also feel the hole that's left behind when the people I love depart quite acutely for a few days. With no regular school year schedule to fall back into and less familiar friends in town to ground us, I suspect I'll be floundering for a few days as we officially begin the Season Formerly Known as Summer. (Seriously. I know I'm harping on this. But people, it has been cold.) Fortunately, we leave for Stockholm in less than a week. There's nothing like a summer vacation to get our spirits up again. Except given what the weather is like is Eastern Sweden right now... "nothing like a summer vacation" may turn out to be the operative words here. Do you think they make seasonal affective disorder lamps for use during this time of year?

Today's assignment: compare and contrast

2007-07-11T08:51:00.001Z

This is the last week of school, and the walls of the classrooms, usually decorated with brightly colored student artwork, are empty save the faded construction paper backgrounds that have yet to be ripped down. Both of my kids have been coming home each day loaded down with armloads of papers and projects as their teachers scramble to get everything sent home before the children scatter for the summer.

There's nothing like the end of a school year to get me nostalgic about my kids' growth and development. Faced with a year's worth of schoolwork and memories, I find myself caught in that familiar parental trap of wistfulness and pride. Julia in particular has grown up so much this year. When I think back on those first few weeks of school spent holding my breath and praying that she'd be able to make this work, it's hard to believe that she's the same confident kid who's now 100% in the mix at school, both socially and academically. Julia found her fit here. The structure and discipline that continue to throw me a bit are a perfect match for her personality and interests, and she's thrived both in the classroom and out of it. For all of my worries early on, this move has probably been the best thing we ever could have done for her.

How to capture the change I've seen in my child this year? Photographs don't do the comparison justice; a few inches are the tip of the iceberg where Julia's growth is concerned. Words fail me here as well; they have too many meanings and it's hard to convey just the ones that fit. Kids are, by definition, growing up all the time. How to describe quite how dramatic this year's evolution seems to me right now? I finally found the answer today while sorting through piles of projects, trying to decide what to hold on to and what to quietly recycle while the kids are still at school. Julia, it turns out, illustrated her own development this year better than I ever could.

When asked to draw a picture of herself for a project done last fall, this is what Julia proudly produced, a lovely -- albeit crude -- drawing of her smiling self:

When faced with the same assignment last week, something dramatically different emerged:

I brought a preschooler to London and now I have a little girl. I see the changes in Julia in so many ways; in her knowledge, her interests, her self confidence and her sense of humor. But most importantly, I see the changes (right here in black and white) in how she views herself.

Too much road, not enough trip

2007-07-09T17:30:00.000Z

We had no pressing plans for the weekend. It had been raining for so many days straight that it was hard to envision being able to do anything recreational, save perhaps building an ark. So when Saturday dawned unexpectedly sunny and beautiful, we were caught a bit off guard. "Let's take a road trip to Cambridge today," Paul suggested. I loved the idea of a spur of the moment adventure, so we booked a car and were on the road in less than an hour's time. We arrived back in London ten hours later and fell happily into bed, where we dreamed pleasant dreams of our fun family day in Cambridge. The end.

What, you want the middle of the story, too? Yeah, that part's a little less idylic. It involves an ill-fated choice to take the scenic route and a little bit of a directional snafu when we tried to make up time on the way there. It further involves getting stuck in traffic on a "closed" motorway (only in England... how do you just close a motorway?) and a resulting eternity of stop-and-go traffic (emphasis on the stop) on the way home. The full story of our little impromptu jaunt out of London involves 6 1/2 hours of the only nice day we've seen in weeks spent in a car and a scant 3 hours spent outside enjoying the weather. Cambridge itself was lovely. It was not, however, 6 1/2 hours in a car worth of lovely. Not by a long shot.

You Are From

2007-07-04T12:23:00.000Z

Just as I forgot that I could not count on the schools to prep my kids for Thanksgiving last November, so was I remiss this month in setting the stage for the Fourth of July. This morning, as we ate a hurried breakfast before school (yes, we're still in school here, and no, this is certainly not a national holiday in England), I scrambled to fill them in on the basics of this very American holiday.

It turned into a slightly trickier conversation than I had anticipated. It was kind of hard to explain why independence was such a desirable thing, given that we currently call the country from which our forefathers sought their freedom "home." I couldn't very well paint the English in a negative light, now could I? We somehow lost track of the Fourth of July conversation as I bumbled through this explanation, and instead ended up having a lovely (and much safer) discussion about the merits of each country. Both England and America, my children firmly pronounced, have good ice cream, and both are therefore equally good places to live. Fair enough. It was definitely worth the entire Revolutionary War to be able to open our own ice cream shops wherever and whenever we wanted, wouldn't you say?

I was thinking later about our morning conversation and about how much my kids' identity and frame of reference has changed since we moved here. As much as I value and appreciate the opportunity they've had to obtain a more global view of the world, on days like today, it makes me a little sad to think of how little of their Americanism they sometimes seem to retain. The Fourth of July is an institution to me. It is fireworks and barbecues and decorating bicycles with red white and blue streamers. To my kids, it is now a day to go to school like any other.

There was a meme going around the Internet for a while based on a poem by George Ella Lyon called Where I'm From. It was a great writing exercise and I always meant to do it myself, but I somehow never got around to it. Instead, today I dug up the template and rather than writing my own history, I wrote one for my kids. I'm patently aware that we have already rewritten their personal history a bit with this move abroad, and that no childhood reminiscing they do as adults would be complete without mention of the time we spent in England. But just for today, I wanted to capture their American selves: a part of their childhood that currently (curiously) feels as much like ancient history as my own youth.

You Are From

You are from Trader Joe's balloons, from Kellogg's Nutrigrain Waffles and big SUVs.
You are from the big yellow house with the short, stubby driveway (warm in the winter, cool in the summer; the quiet whoosh of regulated comfort blowing constantly through inconspicuous vents.)

You are from the dandelions,
the weeping willows you called mango trees whenever friends came to play.
You're from ice cream cake for birthdays and licking your plate,
from Cortney and Andrew and Moose the cat.

You're from stubborn independence and Mommy kisses that make it all better,
From don't you dare climb into that sandbox while you're still wet from the sprinkler and well, then I guess we'll have pizza again.
You are from Judaism
Tot Shabbat and Bim Baum and a dot-painted kippah you wore proudly, if a bit off-center.

You're from from New Jersey in the good 'ole US of A,
flank steak on the grill and juicy tomatoes (neither of which you'll actually eat).
From the day I agreed to buy those hot pink Merrells that Julia just HAD to have even though I hated them with a passion
The gazillion different times that Daddy got poison ivy trying to retrieve a ball which Evan had kicked over our back fence.

Our mementos may be locked in storage at the moment, but our memories are not, and opening your eyes to the world in front of you need not mean closing them to the world you left behind.
Where ever you go and whatever you become, all of this will still be where you're from.

Americans abroad

2007-07-01T09:02:00.000Z

Our plans for today weren't too elaborate; we were going to head over to Selfridges for some good, old fashioned browsing. Paul needs new shoes, I have a couple of birthday gifts to pick up and we've both been keen to check out the shopping monolith's legendary food hall. We'd make a day of it, we figured.

But last night, as we watched coverage of the latest foiled terrorist attacks here in the UK and listened to the new prime minister urge the British people to be vigilant, I turned to Paul. "I'm not so sure I want to take the tube tomorrow," I said hesitantly. I was surprised at how quickly he agreed. "Yeah, I was just thinking a big department store might not be such a great destination for us," he replied.

Paul and I were in New York on September 11 and we returned resolutely to the city each day in the frightening days and weeks that followed. When anthrax was found in my office building less than a month later, I squared my shoulders, rubbed my pregnant belly for luck, got in line with my NBC colleagues for a nasal swab and then went back to work. Paul flew to London on business just days after the July 2005 tube bombings and we did not change our travel plans when a foiled terrorist plot at Heathrow wreaked havoc on the airline industry shortly before we were scheduled to move to the UK last year. We have never been the types to let the threat of terrorism stand in the way of anything we want or need to do.

So what gives now? Is it the fact that the British threat level label of "critical" just sounds more ominous than the American color-coded levels? Does an admonition delivered calmly by a British accented television presenter carry more weight than one proclaimed by a shrill-voiced American reporter? Is the fact that parts of this city are still confusingly unfamiliar to me the reason that I feel less comfortable venturing out into streets where a car bomb could be lurking? Do I feel, as an American here in London, like there is a double target on my head? Or am I just a little more sensible and a little more protective of my family's safety and well being these days? There's really no reason we have to go to Selfridges today. "Something to do" hardly seems worth risking bodily harm...

"We will not yield, we will not be intimidated, and we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life," Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a BBC-televised statement last night. As his rah-rah speech came to a close, I sighed. "That's all well and good," I told Paul as he flipped through the channels in search of something a bit more entertaining, "but we are not British. We are American. And instead of maintaining a stiff upper lip and continuing on my merry way, I plan to cower like a yellow bellied fish."

We're going to have a Monopoly Junior tournament here today and gorge ourselves on the peanut butter cookies I baked with the kids yesterday. Perhaps later, we'll check out some local shops and see if we can locate the items we need without venturing too far from home. It's a stopgap solution; tomorrow, Paul will board the tube as usual for his commute to work and the kids and I will resume our weekday schedule of school and activities. But for today, it's comforting to stay close to home. Do I feel silly for letting this all get to me? A bit. But if what we get out of our nervousness is a quiet day of family togetherness? Well, one could hardly say the terrorists have robbed us of anything at all.

Men at work

2007-06-29T17:39:00.000Z

How many laptops do you think we're going to need to own around here before I can actually get my hands on one of them?

Lost: the plot. Found: a favorite new expression.

2007-06-28T18:42:00.000Z

I got an email last night from a friend whose daughter is in Julia's class. She knew little about the school Sports Day that's scheduled for tomorrow, and was hoping I could shed some light on the particulars of the event.

The fact that she was turning to me for the inside scoop on something as institutionally British as a Sports Day amused me to no end. (The only reason that I even have the slightest clue what a Sports Day entails is that one of Julia's beloved Rainbow Magic fairy books takes place at a school Sports Day and Julia has regaled me with the details of the story with ~~mind numbing~~ refreshingly enthusiastic frequency. Julia and I are both going to be very confused tomorrow if this particular Sports Day does not involve both egg-and-spoon races and an evil goblin lurking about.) But what really made me laugh aloud was the way my friend described her confusion about the plans for the day. "Think I lost the plot completely a few days ago after the email about the picnic and blanket," she wrote.

"Lost the plot." Is there any expression more perfectly descriptive of the situation or more completely British than this one? I love it. I appreciate good language in general and creative expressions in particular, and quite a few British sayings have tickled my fancy since I arrived here. But this one is by far my favorite. Expect to hear me talk about losing the plot frequently from here on out. Hell, I was doing it all along... now at least I'll sound witty and British instead of clueless and American.

It takes a village to write a blog post

2007-06-27T13:20:00.001Z

For every entry I manage to post to this blog, there are dozens more that go unwritten except in my mind. I'd like to pretend that this is because I'm sparing readers all of the really boring parts of my life in London, but when you look at some of the junk that I actually do post, it's obvious that this is not the case. In truth, I'm just unable to keep up with my best intentions. I'll do or hear or see something interesting, fully plan to write about it and then get all caught up in some long meandering post about something far less fascinating and completely lose track of my more appealing subject matter. As a result, I'm sure that reading this blog gives the impression that I do little more in London than sit on the sofa with laptop in hand and contemplate my existence for hours on end.

Fortunately, while my failures at recording the details of my London life in painstaking detail are completely my own, I am not alone in making the attempt. An expat stint is one of those life experiences that seems to inspire people to write things down, and the opportunity to share with friends and family back home makes blogging a popular medium for our scribbles. I have a number of friends here who have been kind enough to share their blogs with me (and, I suspect, quite a few others who are also blogging but keeping their own links under wraps). Reading about life here through their eyes is nearly as fun as recording my own London musings, but it can also be guilt-inspiring when I see them writing about the things that never quite make it on to my Blogger dashboard.

Upon reflection, however, I'm beginning to think that my friends' dutiful efforts to record their experiences might turn out to be my savior rather than my undoing. I could look at the fact that Christine and Chris have both blogged about our girls' day out at Trooping The Colour and feel badly that I never got around to writing about it. I could note that Chris also wrote about the outing she and I took to the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms last week and feel even worse. Or... and tell me I'm not brilliant here... I could just link to their posts and go make myself a sandwich. So here. What she said. And what she said. And what she said here. Now you're all caught up to date on my life.

Phew. I feel much better now. This blogging thing really isn't so onerous when you get the hang of it.

The grass should not technically be greener when the New Jersey summer sun has fried it to a crisp

2007-06-25T13:53:00.000Z

"How are you enjoying summer here," another mother asked me recently as we waited for our kids to be let out of class at the end of the day. I wasn't quite sure how to respond. We were both wearing light jackets over our long sleeved tops, and I'd actually just been wishing that I'd thrown fashion to the wind and opted for a warmer sock/shoe combination instead of my open ballet flats. Was she being facetious or is this truly what passes for summer around here? I was a little too afraid to ask.

My calendar tells me that it's officially summer now, and my friends in the U.S. confirm it. Their kids are out of school and hanging out at the pool these days, while mine still have another 3 weeks to go in the classroom. It's not just our schedule which feels decidedly unsummer-esque. It's also 57 degrees here today (I must confess that I still use Fahrenheit-based sites to get my weather reports, as Celsius remains one big fat mystery to me). This is admittedly a particularly cold spell for late June, even for London. But in a country where the highs rarely peak much beyond the mid 70s, I'm suddenly realizing that this July and August are unlikely to resemble any summer I've ever known. Hot, sticky afternoons at the pool and warm, relaxing evenings in the backyard are not going to be my reality this year (and not just because I have neither a pool nor a backyard). I don't have air conditioning because I'm not likely to need air conditioning, and it's just as well that women don't wear shorts in this country. Unless we get a reprise of last summer's big heat wave, I'm going to have quite a few months of something which may feel like summer to people who are used to it, but to me sounds like little more than an extended spring.

Hot weather does not bring out the best in me, and I have always had a tendency to bitch mightily when the temperatures climb past 85 or so. I hate the way shorts look on me and I'm much happier with an open window than a hermetically sealed air conditioned room. I've hosted far too many barbecues where the guests clustered inside because it was too damn hot in the yard, and I could certainly do without the whole sweaty, chlorinated mass of humanity that is my hometown pool on a hot summer's day. Summer in New Jersey, I truly believe, is overrated at best.

So why, then, am I so unbelievably sad to be missing it?

A self-professed deity

2007-06-19T17:43:00.000Z

My kids got their school report cards today (and yes, I do feel ridiculous even saying that about my 3 and 5 year olds, so let's not dwell to much on it, OK?). Each came with a "self evaluation " page the child had filled out about him/herself; Evan had dictated his favorite things about school and illustrated the page, and Julia had answered a handful of questions about the school year and herself.

"What do you think you are not so good at?" one of the questions on Julia's self evaluation asked. Julia answered with the kind of cocky self assurance only a 5 year old could possess. "I am good at everything," she wrote. At least, that's what Julia meant to write. She missed one of the o's in good, however, resulting in a sentence that actually read "I am God at everything."

I love you dearly kiddo, but I daresay you aint so God at spelling.

OK, so I'm happy and I know it, but HOW do I show it again?

2007-06-18T09:34:00.000Z

I learned early on that it was best not to sing too loudly when I took Evan to toddler music programs here. Many of the songs started out familiar at first and I would heartily join in, only to discover that the words I was belting out were not the words everyone else seemed to be singing. The wheels on the bus don't go all through the town here, they go all day long. There are no ashes, ashes in Ring Around the Rosie, only a tissue, a tissue. The alphabet song ends in zed. (This one offends me the most, I must admit; what good is a nursery rhyme that doesn't actually rhyme? That poor dangling v...) Even the Hokey Pokey seems to involve different steps.

Singing with my kids has always been a fun time waster for me, but it's getting harder and harder to do these days. Evan's favorite song is Wind the Bobbin Up, a ditty which I can assure you that I had never heard before we set foot in the UK and still don't fully understand. He also likes to Zoom Zoom Zoom , and he and Julia both love to be Sleeping Bunnies, both of which, while charming, are completely new concepts for me. Lately, both kids have been completely captivated by a song about a fish. (I originally thought this one was a little insipid, but have since reversed my option, as the song appears to have succeeded where I have failed in teaching Evan to tell his right from his left.) My children may retain their American accents and their American identity, but when it comes to nursery rhymes, they're 100% British these days.

Unfortunately for all of us, when it comes to British kiddie songs, I'm lost. I'm still a little unclear about what a bobbin is or why preschoolers should sing about them. I'll be damned if I can remember that little zed detail. I'm pokeying while everyone else is still hokeying. The tunes and lyrics that all of the other mothers seem to fondly recall from childhood, while cute and catchy, are all new to me and their subtle nuances still somehow manage to elude me. I can pull off the London thing in more and more ways these days. But among the 3-5 set, I'm still exposed as a fraud every time I open my mouth.

Socially awkward

2007-06-15T12:51:00.000Z

Evan has reached that odd age where he is old enough to independently cook up elaborate play date plans with school friends but not yet old enough to attend said play dates independently. "Davin's going to come over to our house next week for a play date," he'll sing out gleefully as I greet him at the classroom door, leaving me little choice but to follow up with Davin's mother to arrange such a rendezvous and then chat politely with her while the kids play.

I hate this stage. I rarely actually hate the play dates themselves... most of the other mothers I've been forced into this kind of socializing with have turned out to be completely lovely and I've struck up some nice friendships of my own in the process of tending to my children's social lives. But the actual coordinating and planning and making sure the house is tidy and figuring out what to feed everyone for lunch is just the kind of Emily Post crap that makes me wonder why the hell I ever wanted to be a stay at home mom in the first place.

Everything about these awkward social situations is uncomfortable for me, but the worst part is always placing the phone call to a parent I don't really know to set the whole thing up. I dread picking up the phone, always procrastinating and putting off that stiff, uneasy conversation for as long as I can. Whenever possible, I hide behind the anonymity of email or the ease of an outside-the-classroom-door conversation. There is little worse, I've always thought, than calling parents I don't know on my kids' behalf.

I was wrong. There is something worse. Today, after weeks of begging on Evan's part and a mind numbing "Tristan, Tristan" chant that clearly wasn't going to let up until I had concrete proof of a planned get together, I placed a call to a woman I've only even laid eyes on once or twice in my life. And because my kids' silly school refuses to put parents' names on class lists, I actually had to say "hello, is Tristan's mum there please?" I have never felt more foolish.

On the up side, I suppose all of the social awkwardness of the situation can only be attributed to "Evan's mum." Maybe there's something to this school's anonymity policy after all...

Leaps of faith

2007-06-14T12:29:00.000Z

Some time next week, on a date that I can't quite recall and therefore can't officially mark, we will hit the one-year mark on this London adventure of ours. Those of you frantically flipping your mental calendars back in confusion right now are correct that the dates don't sound quite right; we've actually been living here for just over nine months now. But it was a year ago next week that Paul first called from work to tentatively float a crazy idea by me. By the time we hung up the phone, I was pretty sure that our lives had just changed forever.

For weeks afterwards, we played at deliberation, trying to pretend that we would make this decision with careful analysis and painstaking consideration. In truth, it was a gut decision, the kind that’s made in a split second as a surge of emotion lurches deep within your belly. Before I had even named the feeling, it had consumed me. “What would you think about moving to London for a year or two?” I didn’t know what I thought of the idea, could hardly process the question even as I foresaw the answer. But I knew that we would be going.

I’d like to think that I pulled off a decent show of evaluating options in the weeks that followed. In truth, I was already in full planning mode, researching communities and housing and schools…. which digital television service would best meet our needs and where to find decent sushi and how to locate soy milk. Before Paul’s package was even fully negotiated, I had memorized rental listings and lined up a playgroup for Evan. Before we had even begun to tell friends we were moving, I had picked a synagogue and found a book group. Somehow, in the name of research, the theoretical had become tangible.

Signing the contract was anti climactic. I had been on the phone with the UK for days by then, sorting out the intricacies of sea shipments and discussing Julia's academic needs with an educational consultant. The actual contract was just one more thing on Paul’s to-do list; paperwork was “his,” the logistics of shutting down a suburban American life and ramping up an urban British existence “mine.” We lost sight of the enormity of what we were doing as we lost ourselves in the minutiae of getting it done. There were dozens of goodbyes, countless appointments, errand lists a mile long. And then… nothing. An empty house. An empty calendar. A blank slate. Just our little family of four, strapped into our seats as the plane hurtled toward our new life.

There were many times in the heady, hectic days leading up to our departure for London that I felt we’d officially taken the leap into our new life. But only once we arrived did I realize that I hadn’t even begun to jump. It had been easy to envision life in London within the framework of my suburban New Jersey experience. The reality of adjusting to a foreign life in what was in truth a foreign city would turn out to be my true hurdle.

Nine months later, I’m still taking daily leaps of faith as I struggle to perfect that adjustment. How much of me can I retain? How much of the person who I was before this experience do I need to set aside? What can I learn from living here? What can the people I encounter here learn from me? Am I a cultural liaison, a world traveler or simply a stay-at-home mother based in a new locale? How do I reconcile my need to make the most of these years with my instinct to provide stability and a consistent home life for my kids? How do I do this right?

A year into the game, time has given me the gift of familiarity with my new life, but it hasn't been nearly as helpful in providing all the answers I seek. I still find myself questioning things on a daily basis: my values, my beliefs, my sense of what's right and what's wrong and what simply doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. It’s often the smaller stumbling blocks – finding a substitute for Mr. Clean Magic Erasers or accepting that my 5 year old’s curriculum includes French and spelling -- that trip me up the most, but somehow I keep jumping through the hoops. I have finally decided that I don't have to know where I'm headed in order to get there successfully. Again and again here, I close my eyes and jump. Even as the micromanager in me screams out in protest, I let go and wait to see what happens next.

A year ago today, the continuation of my life in New Jersey was a fait accompli. Julia would go to PreK with her friends and Evan would start preschool and I would do some volunteer work and some freelancing and a heck of a lot of chauffeuring. A year ago next week, I tossed all of that aside and started anew. Making this move felt like the biggest leap we'd ever taken, and I spent much of last summer dreaming of the day that the stress and uncertainty surrounding our relocation would all be behind us. But looking back, I know that the stress and uncertainty we felt then only foreshadowed what was yet to come. Getting here? That was the easy part. Making this experience as impactful as it felt in that first gut clenching instant it was proposed to me? I won’t know for sure that I’ve truly made that leap until my feet finally touch the ground.

Even our fiction is the sum of our experiences

2007-06-12T07:34:00.000Z

Julia's class ran into some unexpected free time toward the end of the school day yesterday, and her teacher suggested that the children fill the time by writing their own stories. They weren't given too much guidance; the teacher just told them to use their imagination and to write something that they would like to read, but had never read before. Here's what Julia came up with (spelling kept intact, much to my spell checker's annoyance, but a bit of punctuation added to make it readable):

Ons apon a time ther was a flaiyg horse. He was macical. He had a byotafl gardin and he was byotafl in his gardin. He had suniy skys as log as he was in his gardin. The End.

The flying horse didn't surprise me in the least; Julia is all about girly things like fairies and flying equestrian creatures these days. Ditto the magical aspect to her tale; magic crops up in pretty much everything Julia talks about lately. But the horse's ability to keep the skies sunny as long as he was in his garden? That made me laugh out loud. I can't imagine such a plot twist would ever have occurred to Julia before we'd spent some time living in London, but now that we've been here a while, it's obvious to all of us that sunny skies are the stuff of true magic. What each and every Londoner wouldn't give to get their hands on that horse...

Who put the "easy" in the EasyJet? (Whomever he was, he was a liar, but a damn good marketer...)

2007-06-07T08:28:00.000Z

This part of the world is particularly rife with low cost airlines. I'm not sure why they're all clustered here (and it's entirely possible that they're actually not and that it is in fact only my attention span for such things that is entirely clustered here at the present time), but the European market is clearly big business for all of these low budget operations. I suppose the close proximity of dramatically differing cultures and climates in this region makes it easy to market diverse sounding destinations that are accessible via relatively short inexpensive flights. (It just wouldn't be the same in the U.S.: "An unbeatable bargain: fly from one side of Texas to the other at a low, low price!")

At first, I thought that these budget airlines were not for the likes of us. I'm a nervous flyer under the best of circumstances, and I don't care to cut corners when the plummet factor is a part of the equation. Logistically, these operations sounded like a nightmare, too. No reserved seats? With two small children in tow? The mental image of jostling amongst a gazillion self important business travelers to try to find space to deposit my offspring and their accoutrement made my mind spin. I had mentally dismissed the budget airline concept before we'd even arrived in the UK.

Eventually, all of that marketing and my inner cheapskate got the best of me, though. Flying as a family of four is expensive, and we do a lot of it. Every time I would see an advertisement proclaiming "Rome for £25" or "Dublin for £10", I would wonder what the hell I was doing shelling out full fares for big name airlines. And so we tentatively tested the waters with BMI when we flew to Edinburgh this winter, and were please with the results. It wasn't that much cheaper after I'd nervously upgraded us to the "choose your seats in advance" category, but the check in process went smoothly, the plane seemed to be in good shape and we arrived at our destination on time and unscathed. Perfect. I was ready for the big time.

I scoured the Internet for rock bottom rates to Prague, using every low fare aggregator I could get my hands on. Each time I'd think I'd found a good price, I'd run the numbers, only to stare quizzically at the final total. £35 fares, it turns out (once you've added the return flights and the taxes and fees and multiplied by 4 family members and multiplied again by 2 because I still can't stop converting to dollars) are the makings of thousand dollar trips. If I wanted to take a solo one way flight to Ibiza on a Tuesday carrying only a handbag and never return, I could probably get one heck of a deal. (Tempting. So very tempting.) But if not, the whole low fare thing is relative at best. It's lowER, perhaps. But there is no way that I can use the words "low cost" and "nearly a thousand bucks" in the same sentence without some serious eye rolling.

Nonetheless, I was committed to the thrill of the chase by then, and determined to get the best possible fares to Prague even if they didn't offer me the enormous savings I'd initially anticipated. And so I booked us on EasyJet. We were leaving on a flight that necessitated setting our alarms for an hour we've rarely seen since our kids' newborn days. We would be returning at an hour my children have never in their lives been awake to see before. But I was willing to be flexible to save a few quid. (At least I think we'd saved a few quid. To be honest, I had so many windows open and discarded on my laptop by the time I finally selected those flights that I can't absolutely guarantee that the conveniently timed, amenity-filled British Air flights weren't a pound or two cheaper.)

Could the whole thing have been anything but a disaster after that auspicious start? Could have been, I suppose. But it wasn't. The combination of no online check-in option, check-in counters that do not open until exactly 2 hours before a flight departs and a paltry few under-trained agents working at those counters led to insanely long, unbelievably disorganized queues full of irate passengers. Add in the fact that seating priority appeared to be given in the order that people checked in and all of that famous British queuing decorum just went completely out the window. In the end, I can't even imagine what all of the fuss was about, because even the priority boarding (which we did end up receiving because we had small children in tow) just meant first onto the bus that drove passengers out to the airplane. Once off the bus, it was a mad free-for-all. Delightful.

We did end up seated with our children, of course (who else would want 'em?) and from there, the flights themselves went smoothly enough. There was limited food available for purchase on board as they had run out of many of their offerings, but we'd brought our own. We had some delays both coming and going, but nothing I wouldn't have expected with any other airline. There was quite a bit of turbulence on the way out that had me clutching the armrests and wondering why on earth I'd opted to stick my whole family in this discount tin can in the first place, but we did obviously land safely in the end, so no harm there. But the kicker to the whole exhausting rigmarole was that because of some odd quirk of EasyJet's baggage policies, the stroller which we'd optimistically gate-checked was magically unavailable until we reached the baggage claim. That meant traipsing through long airport corridors with arm loads of kid crap which we generally stash in the buggy. It meant corralling two frisky kids during a 45 minute customs wait in Prague without the benefit of a 5-point-harness to keep the two separated. And on our return flight at that ungodly hour my kids had never seen? Well, let's just say that carrying the dead weight of a sleeping child through those long airport corridors is one heck of a workout. And that trying to bribe sleepy children with chocolate to get them to pick up the pace produces mixed results at best. (It was worth a try, though, Paul. And I certainly enjoyed the chocolate...)

In the end, I'm fairly certain that we lost more in convenience than we gained in money saved with the whole EasyJet experience. I'm ready to go back to my big name airlines with their online check-in and their convenient flight times and their free coffee and peanuts. And yet, as we slipped exhausted into our seats on the Gatwick Express at midnight after finally escaping the airport mayhem, I spotted a sign above our heads advertising trips to Marrakesh for only £35. Marrakesh. Doesn't that sound exotic and fun? And only £35? Well, that's a true bargain, too good to pass up really. I wonder whether there are any good family-friendly accommodations there. I'll have to do a search...

Somebody stop me, please. Quickly.

Prague recap

2007-06-01T13:23:00.001Z

Prague? Fabulous. Insanely picturesque, a remarkably easy city to learn in a short period of time, and an incredible abundance of clean public toilets everywhere. I'll refrain from commenting on which of these factors was the most important to me (though anyone who's been in my company for more than 30 seconds can probably guess), but together, they conspired to make for the perfect travel destination for our family.

Was it touristy? Oh, God, yes. I don't know that I've ever seen such a touristy city, and I certainly haven't heard so many American accents since I left the States. (In my least favorite American encounter moment, we passed an American couple on a tight stairwell. The woman profusely apologized as we all did that little "I'll go left, you go right" dance and her husband chided her for bothering. "No one understands you here," he told her, "so you can cut with the social niceties." Um, yeah. Way to make me wish I didn't speak your language, mister...) But you know what? American buffoons aside, I'm OK with touristy at this point in my life. Touristy means there will be food my kids will eat and attractions that interest all of us. (And bathrooms. Did I mention the bathrooms? Lots and lots of bathrooms.) It's a guaranteed good time. Save the "go native and experience the region as a local would" type experiences for when our children aren't 3 and 5. For now, bring on the touristy, even if it means we're surrounded by more than a few other tourists. (I resisted the urge to tell the guy off in any language, by the way. Aren't you proud of me and my newly-developed British restraint?)

When we look back on Prague, I imagine we'll all have different favorite memories. Julia will remember St Vitus' Cathedral, which was quite literally the first sight anywhere we've ever traveled that has caused her jaw to drop and no words to pass her lips save a simple breathless "wow." Evan will remember the Prague Castle and the fact that there are 97 steps down from it to the street below (give or take a few dozen -- the counting efforts of a 3 and a 5 year old, while wildly entertaining to all those around us, may have been somewhat less than completely precise). Paul will remember that the beer was cheaper than the water (this, as he reminded us pretty much every time we sat down at any restaurant, is my husband's idea of true nirvana). I will remember the breathtaking postcard-like sights everywhere we turned. And my bladder will remember all of those WCs. A lovely touch, I tell you. The world could learn a lot from the Czechs about the placement and upkeep of public conveniences.

For more of our Prague memories, check out my Flickr album. Click "detail" or select the photos individually for my explanations and commentary or just view the slideshow if you've had enough of what I have to say already...

My little saving grace

2007-05-26T13:17:00.000Z

We took a family trip to the bookstore today to prepare for our trip to Prague, which we will be embarking on early tomorrow morning (translation: don't expect a blog post from me for a while). I was in search of a guidebook (what I was really looking for was something with a title like "What To Do In Prague When It's Raining from The Second You Arrive Until The Moment You Depart" but alas, I found nothing of the sort -- perhaps this is an opening in the market which some enterprising travel writer ought to pursue). Paul wanted a new novel for the plane (apparently, the last book I bought him, while entertaining, is "too damn big" to go anywhere with). And Julia and Evan, well trained in the art of travel by now, were keen to select the "can't open until we're on the plane" books that they know I always purchase to ensure that they are cheerful participants in the airport transfer and security checkpoint processes (it works like a charm every time).

Before we left, I warned Julia that I would not be buying her a Rainbow Magic book today and that she would need to come up with a different selection. I have nothing against the Rainbow Magic fairies (with which Julia is totally and utterly obsessed right now) in theory; they are the subject of a gazillion sweet, if slightly insipid, books which, while certainly not fine literature, are guaranteed to be harmless and entertaining independent reads. Julia has almost a dozen of the books in her own personal collection and has checked dozens more out of the library, and there's no question that they've been instrumental in fostering her love of reading. She can finish a whole damn Rainbow Magic book in 20 minutes flat, however, and I was looking for something that would entertain her through a bit more of the flight. "But I want a Rainbow Magic book," she whined. "Then you can have one," I cheerfully replied. "But you'll have to buy it with your allowance money."

The allowance card is the best tool in my parenting bag of tricks right now. We started Julia, as I'm sure many families do, on an allowance when she reached the age of 5. The 50 pence a week that she receives from us (when we remember, which I must confess is not yet a weekly happening) was supposed to instill a sense of personal responsibility and teach her about money management. In practice, it's not only done both of those things, but it's also had the unexpected benefit of releasing me from playing the heavy every time she spots a trinket she'd like to own or a little kiddie ride she'd like to try out. "Sure," I answer each time she begs for this kind of impulse purchase. "I'll lend you the money until we get home and then you can pay me back with the allowance money in your piggy bank." The first few times, Julia gave the matter careful consideration. Now she barely even pauses to think any more. "No thanks," she'll invariably answer. "I don't want it that badly." Beautiful. I'm not the heavy and yet I'm not stuck buying bracelets that will turn her arm green or feeding coins into big Thomas the Tank Engines that lurch and sing for 35 seconds before screeching to a halt.

Generally, I love the allowance because it makes Julia think about the value of money and it keeps me from ever having to face the "spend foolishly or deal with the ensuing tantrum" dilemma. Today, however, I actually wanted Julia to consider breaking into the piggy bank to make a purchase. She's not spent a single pence of her allowance money to date and while I appreciate and value her natural instinct to save, I also wanted her to see the pleasurable side of spending her own money on a thoughtful and valuable purchase. So I suggested that we get out the piggy bank and see what she's saved.

It took over an hour for Julia to count out all of the coins and work out all of the math equations necessary to calculate her net worth. Once we'd determined how much she had (and I'd realized just how many weeks we've forgotten to pay her and guiltily made a private vow to get better at remembering such things), she wanted to know how much a Rainbow Magic book would cost and what she'd have left if she bought one. We worked out those equations, too, and she sat staring at the piles for a bit. Then she swept up all of the coins and fed them back into the bank. I wasn't sure what exactly that meant, but I decided to wait and see.

At the bookstore, Julia read the back of every Rainbow Magic book on the shelf. She admired the dresses of some of the new fairies we've not seen before and told me the back story behind others she'd seen allusions to in the books she's already read. And then she picked out a new book in the Princess Mirror-Belle series for me to purchase for her to read on the plane. "Are you going to buy a fairy book, too?" I asked. She shook her head. "Nope," she replied, walking easily away from a display that generally inspires long involved discussions of want and need and must have. "Not today."

I'm not sure where she came from, this daughter of mine. In the hour or so that we were shopping today, Paul and I probably managed to drop upwards of a hundred quid; first there were the bedside reading lamps we've been needing that were a good price at Woolies and then they necessitated light bulbs and a new power cord, we were out of printer paper, Julia needed new school socks, I had no raincoat for our wash-out trip to Prague, and the bookstore meant a book apiece. All reasonably priced, necessary purchases, of course, but they added up (as they always do) and we shelled out the cash easily (as we always do). We're all for saving in theory, but we're all about spending in practice. Julia, it appears, might turn out to be the polar opposite. She seems to have an innate need to sock her cash away which wins out over any desire she might have to spend it. And while that throws me a bit, as such revelations about how different my daughter and I are often do, it also pleases me. At least at the rate she's going, she'll be comfortable enough that she'll easily be able to care for me in my old age... provided, that is, that I can somehow convince her that I'm worth it.

I'm just a girl who CAN say no

2007-05-24T13:13:00.000Z

Those who know me will not be in the least bit surprised to hear that two separate people tried to hit me up this week to serve as the Class Rep for Julia's school next year. (In fact, I think I can hear several of you giggling right now...)

There are two types of people in this world: committee people and non-committee people. I fall into the first category. From the high school youth group to the college sorority scene to the National Council of Jewish Women to the PTA at my kids' school in the States... even the Hampstead Women's Club here in London, I invariably find myself on executive boards and task forces and sub-committees almost as soon as I've introduced myself. I find myself unable to casually look away when someone asks for volunteers and I'm completely incapable of keeping my mouth shut when discussion ensues about the best way to get something done. This is a lethal combination, I've found. Any good committee person recognizes ~~suckers~~ like-minded committee people a mile away, and it's never long before I'm pressed into service by a fellow volunteer type.

In general, this isn't a bad thing. I like committee work and I enjoy volunteering. Why shouldn't I make eye contact and cheerfully welcome the opportunity to contribute? And so I always say yes to this kind of crap. Always. Until this week. I'm so accustomed to saying yes that I wasn't sure quite what was going on when I heard myself politely demure and offer up a litany of excuses (and suggestions for alternatives -- I still can't quite keep my nose out of the mix completely). But the bottom line, I realized later, was that I simply didn't want the job. That seems kind of odd; I always want the job, regardless of what the job might be. But I have very little interest in socializing with this crowd, so why should I be the one responsible for organizing coffee mornings and other parent social events? I have limited knowledge of the area and equally limited transportation options, so why should I be the one schlepping around looking for teacher gifts? I find this particular school's PTA to be poorly run and oddly irrelevant to our kids' academic experience, so why should I attend monthly meetings on behalf of the families in Julia's class? And so I said no. Let someone else step up to the plate. Not me. Not this time.

Big deal, right? Ordinarily, I suppose it wouldn't be. People say no to things like this all the time (as the person who is nearly always the one trying to corral them into saying yes, I can testify to this). But for me to say no? To a committee type thing? That is a Very Big Deal -- a first, even. It felt strangely liberating (and far more empowering than saying yes has ever felt, I must admit). I could get used to this. Perhaps here in London, where my life is a temporary one and the stakes (real or imagined) are lower, I can finally learn to set some boundaries and say no to things.

Or perhaps I've just left myself open to be the Rep for Evan's class instead.

The golden hour

2007-05-22T18:42:00.000Z

It is just past 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday evening and I am officially off duty. Both of my children have been tucked into bed and, while I know full well from the humming that can be heard in one bedroom and the swish of turning pages that is coming from another that neither child is actually asleep just yet, the hustle and bustle of baths and stories and "tickling teeth" is all behind me now. With Paul not yet home and an easy meal waiting to be prepared, I feel no great compulsion to start dinner just yet. The house is picked up, my "to do" list is appreciably shorter than it was this morning and the dryer is busily spinning the last of my whites for the day. I have poured a glass of red wine, the first thing I've actually done for myself in many hours, and I'm absently looking out my dining room window as I take my first sip.

I may have just said "good night" to my children, but it's clearly not night time outside my window just yet. The time change and the approach of summer and the fact that we are living in a city that is so far north have all conspired to provide us with a lot of natural light these days. I open my eyes to daylight far earlier than I'd ever actually consider starting my day and the sky stays bright here well past 9 p.m. already, though it's not yet even June. Now, at a little past 7:30, it's still clearly daytime out there, and yet the sun has lowered just enough that all of the buildings I can see on the horizon are bathed in a luminous golden glow.

Several hours from now, when the sky is dark, I'll be able to look out this window and spot the lights of the London Eye to help me to orient myself to the city. I never tire of that sight, or of that "pinch me" feeling which reminds me of my early days of working in Rockefeller Center (before I got bored and jaded and wished they'd just take the damn Christmas tree down and shut up the ice rink so that all those bumbling tourists would go home and stop messing up my commute). It's too early for me to see the Eye now, though; to be honest, with this strange light, it's hard to identify much of anything. What I'm looking at is little more than a mishmash, one big gilded expanse of buildings. As much as I love the sight of familiar London landmarks like the Eye, I don't really miss them right at this moment. The buildings before me may not be identifiable, but they're nearly iridescent in places, and the warmth of that illuminated skyline perfectly matches the calm that's finally settled over my home.

I spend the next 15 minutes trying to capture the view on camera. I'm a lousy photographer, though, and I'm working with a little point and shoot Nikon designed for capturing first teeth and dance recitals, not a vibrant city on the cusp of evening. I just can't seem to get that warm glow to come across in my snapshots. My photos are ordinary images of a distant city skyline, without any of the brilliance or the magic I can so clearly see with my own eyes. Eventually, I give up and put down the camera. There are other ways to capture this moment. I won't waste any more of my golden hour fiddling around with a camera. I may not be guaranteed to remember this sight from my photos. But I can burn it into my memory nonetheless.

Why yes, my camera is working again... however did you guess?

2007-05-21T12:46:00.000Z

One of the nicest things about having house guests is that their presence provides a built-in opportunity for us to play tourists in our own city. The first few times that people came to visit, this was a no brainer for us; we hadn't seen or done anything here, either, so we were happy to visit whatever traditional attractions our guests found appealing (sometimes with less than fabulous results). As time passes and we get more and more checked off of our mental London "to do" list, however, we find ourselves casting a slightly wider tourism net in an effort to entertain ourselves as well as our visitors.

Our guest this past week was my Aunt Carol, who flew in from Los Angeles to spend a week with us before continuing on to Rome. Carol's quite well traveled and, having been to London several times before, has probably seen even more of the city's traditional tourist attractions than we have. With this in mind, we decided on Saturday to get the heck out of Dodge for a day and check out the sights of Windsor, most notably that big stone building in the center of the city... you know, the one where the Queen lives?

(Yes, the flag flying in the distance does mean that the Queen was in residence the day that we were there. And no, we didn't meet her. But Evan stepped in some royal dog poo. Pretty equally exciting, wouldn't you say?)

Windsor Castle was a great day trip for the adults and kids alike... Julia was fascinated by Queen Mary's doll house and both kids were wowed by the grandeur of the State Apartments. Personally, I was a big fan of the little touches, like the little tiny enamel crowns on the top of each lamp post.

That's just cool, no?

We've been to a number of castles and palaces at this point (you truly cannot move two feet without stumbling upon a royal residence of some sort in this country. I can't think of a proper parallel in America. Target, maybe? There are a heck of a lot of Targets in the States, and lord knows I find them impressive, too...). So far, Windsor Castle has been my favorite. The place is just vast and incredibly grand. And the best part? The place was jam packed with tourists, of course, but it was also big enough that you could actually see around the masses. For once, I didn't even have to borrow photos from Google Images; the ones I took myself came out halfway decent.

Add in the obligatory cute kids shot, and it's clear that a good time was had by all. (Oh, come on... that guard was loving every second of our visit. Can't you just see it in his eyes?)

Shop locally, eat globally

2007-05-11T17:13:00.000Z

One of my favorite things about living here is the fact that we have a fabulous greengrocer around the corner. I adore my local fruiterer (yes, they call them fruiterers here, a grammatical construction so bizarre sounding to the American ear that Paul insisted for the first month or so that we lived here that all of the "fruiterer" signs simply must be jokes). I love walking in to a beautiful, colorful display of fresh produce. I love hand selecting a wide range of local and exotic fruits and vegetables for my family to enjoy each week. I love the neighborhood feeling in the shop and the fact that all the guys who work there know me by sight and my kids by name. "The Gala apples were a little mushy last week... can you suggest something better?" I'll say when I come in, and I'll get an answer like "try them again. You haven't been here in about four days, and they're much better now." I love getting this kind of guidance (which is always completely accurate, by the way), and the fact that these guys so clearly knows their produce and their customers endears them to me all the more.

This week, my fruiterer steered me toward the Pink Ladies when the time came for me to purchase apples, and I obligingly purchased several, though I'd never tried them before. As usual, he was right -- they're crisp and delicious and my kids have been gobbling them up. I was slicing up one of the last of them just now, while thinking how grateful I am for this foreign and fabulous fruiterer experience, when I happened to notice the sticker on the piece of fruit.

Oops. Perhaps not so foreign after all, to me anyway. Turns out that the produce I'm loyally purchasing at my local greengrocer was actually grown in my other backyard. Go figure. I guess it would be a real stretch to say I'm supporting local farmers with these kinds of purchases, huh? Oh well. At least I've got easy access to some damn good apples.