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Caden went yesterday to a birthday party for one of his classmates. The party was held at a rock climbing facility. Walking in, I wondered who in the world thought a bunch of five and six year olds would be able to climb the giant walls in front of us. When you look at the above picture, you see his black eye that he got at school a few days ago. He ended up with a black eye because he ran into a wall. Literally. He was running and “forgot to turn” and ran straight into a wall. With that information in mind, it is clear why I questioned his ability to climb the rock wall.

However, always amazing to me, see pictures below of him scurrying up the rock wall with ease and gracefulness (two words that I have never used in the same sentence as Caden). Maybe those future chess lessons and math clubs will be traded for an occasional rock wall climb!

He’s the one on the right side in the dark purple shirt and blue jeans almost to the top…

Before the next adventure of Scott being gone for just over a month, I thought I should share the fun stuff we have recently been up to. While we have been working ridiculous hours during the week, we have managed to do some fun stuff on the weekends here in London. In addition to going to Hyde Park (with an obligatory stop for delicious hamburgers at Hard Rock) and seeing Buckingham Palace, we have also taken the kids a few other place, including the M & M store. One of the coolest was going to a Safari Park. This ended up being extraordinarily fun. The only way I can see this having been cooler was if the monkeys jumped on our car instead of all the cars around us.

We also had an adventure and took the kids to St Albans in far north London to see some of our friends from Amsterdam that moved to London just before we did. It was really nice seeing friendly faces. While we have greatly enjoyed our stay in England, we have found it a bit more difficult to meet people that we want to run around with. Most of this of course if our problem — too much work and not enough play.

The kids had their week out of school and started back on Monday which happened to be Halloween. We had a good time although it proved to be quite different than the proper American Halloween escapade. We had quite a lot of children show up at the door dressed up. Most knocked and then said “Happy Halloween!”. This seemed fine until we knocked on a door and our kids said “trick or treat!”. The man looked confused, paused (uncomfortably long), and then said, “Treat is I guess my choice.” Random, but funny. The British kids were uncomfortable grabbing more than one “sweetie” at a time, even when encouraged. So polite of them. So British of them. A stark difference indeed from an American Halloween.

Mary-freaking-Poppins has been great. I finally asked her if I could use her name and pictures on this blog, and she kindly agreed. So Mary-freaking-Poppins will now be known as Marisa. The kids love her. We love her. She is an equal in our house and we no longer have three children. Such a good place to be.

Scott left this morning for the airport to go to the States for a month. I’m sad to see him go, but it will be nice to see what happens with his trial. He has lived and breathed this case for five years. It will be hard on everyone in the family, but this should be the last long trip we have.

Wish me luck as I navigate this country, this family and this next adventure without Scott!

A video of the last few weekends:

So everyone has been doing well. The kids are loving school and are currently out on their 1.5 week term break. The British school system is fantastic at raising the bar for expectations, but it seems like they are out of school for a week to two weeks every other month. Of course it fits nicely with the fact that most Brits get 4-5 weeks of vacation standard. The surprising bit is that they achieve so much more in terms of learning, but seem to always be out of school. Perplexing.

Scott and I had out eight year anniversary earlier this week. Of course we were both too busy to do much in the way of celebration, but we did manage to have dinner a couple of days later. We are still planning to have our big 10 year hoopla in two years so mark your calendars. We hope to have a similar party to the wedding (at the ranch) which was F-U-N.

We are gearing up now for the hard part. Scott leaves for a week this weekend, back for a week, and then back to the States for 4-5 weeks of trial. Fingers crossed for a good outcome at the trial. Fingers crossed that this household doesn’t self-destruct in his absence! Fortunately Mary-Freaking-Poppins is here and wonderful.

Scott and I will be returning to Houston for three days the first weekend in December and hope to see as many of you as possible. We miss everyone terribly.

A few pics of recent:

Mom visited so we of course we did the obligatory pub visit!

Caden looking fierce in his skeleton (glow in the dark) pajamas. He likes pajama days as much as his momma!

Keali off to school. She won the school award for being tidy and polite. She is such a sweet cuddly little girl.

So I normally post on our adventures as they relate to travel so as to keep a diary of it for the kids, but also to stay in touch with everyone back home. The travel adventures are really only a part of our daily excitement. After thinking about it, I decided that in order to keep a true diary, I need to share more than the places we visit.

Truth be told, our kids are constant source of adventures. Our most recent one was probably one more of heartbreak as well as pride. It’s longer than most posts, but it goes kinda like this…

Since moving to Europe, we have a live in au pair which allows Scott and I both to work full time, but also allows us to enjoy our kids more when we aren’t working. The au pair helps with the kid stuff (their laundry, their groceries, etc). It also provides a great deal of stability for the kids since we don’t have a babysitter or three coming and going randomly.

When we moved to Amsterdam, we brought over a girl from Houston that had been with our family. Overall, she was able to make sure the kids were generally safe and mostly followed the rules we applied to the kids. However, virtually all other job duties were and continued to be ignored. After over a year of that simply not working out, and many talks later to hopefully improve the situation, it became apparent that the expectations wouldn’t be met and it was time to send her back to Houston. The parting was amicable. I believed she was sad to leave our kids, and as she had become part of our family, we were all sad to see her go…

Another girl (from Germany – let’s call her AR) who was also living in London with a family was looking for a new au pair position. AR’s host-family was mean to her and treated her very badly. She wanted out of her living situation as urgently as we needed someone to come in and help us. AR was with us for a week. In that week, she had the kids exactly 1.5 hours by herself while we attended a school meeting. We came home and she was distraught and said that Caden was too “mentally strong for her” and that she couldn’t believe he was only 6 years old. She didn’t want to stay long term but agreed to give us three weeks to find a replacement. I was so sad. I couldn’t imagine that the kids behavior was so bad that she would quit after an hour. Admittedly, I was also quite proud that he was outsmarting and outplaying a grown up…

So that’s sort of where the story gets interesting. I immediately started interviewing new girls for the au pair job. I talked to so many girls, I lost count. I received over 600 applications. I finally found a girl who I really thought was a great fit. We sent many emails back and forth and it looked like we would skype for the final and formal interview and she would come live with us. Then, one night I received a note from her saying that my old au pair (from Houston) knew one of her friends who was an au pair in London. Small world. Come to find out, our au pair that lived with us for a year (and enjoyed many very nice vacations, a great deal of unearned income, and more experiences that she would ever have had in her life) had told the girl that we treated her like a slave, made her work almost every weekend, and (the worst) hated our kids.

Now since she was a very young (mentally) person, I’m fine with the slave bit (she was with the kids generally 22 hours per week and we hired a housekeeper which should have been her job) and even the weekend bit (we hired babysitters almost every time we needed weekend support which was rare). Honestly I wrote that off to immaturity, laziness, and entitlement syndrome. However, I have to admit that the “hating the kids” bit put me over the deep end. How unbelievably sad I was to hear this. I wonder how long she had felt this way and how she treated the kids when we weren’t around… I only hope she didn’t hurt them in anyway mentally. It has certainly taught me to be more aware and not take things at face value.

We lost the au pair that I really wanted to hire because of this. Insult to injury indeed. About four days after this occurred, we learned that the girl from Germany (AR) had moved into our house in order to escape her other family and that in fact she had another job all along which she would start October 1. We were only a place where she could stay in a holding pattern. The biggest disappointment of this was that she blamed it on our kid. Bad show. She of course moved out the next day. That was a good day for me.

So I continued on our hunt for the perfect au pair. We hired a professional nanny to get us over the hump. We were fortunate to find a girl that we liked very much (let’s call her MP). She flew over for the weekend and spent the last weekend with us. Honestly, when she had described herself as Mary Poppins (MP) during one of our many email exchanges, I didn’t believe it. However, when she was with the kids, she was amazing. She took to Caden immediately. Caden played with her almost the entire time she was here. I am happy to say that she is moving in next Monday (9 days away, but who is counting…).

She is a bright amazing multilingual musician/artist/dancer/Mary Poppins. I am hopeful that she will be with our family until at least next summer. I can’t wait for her to come here.

In the mean time, we keep doing what I think everyone with kids does: keep on keeping on. Caden has had the best behavior ever the last month or so. I think he has only had 2 time outs in the last 2 weeks. Anyone who knows our naughty, feisty, spirited, bright and beautiful boy appreciates this as almost unbelievable! We are looking forward to the next adventure in our life!