London

The Olympics has now officially kicked off in London. There were several fun events leading up to it.

First the torch traveled across England and we were fortunate enough to live about a 3 minute walk from relay. We walked down the street one morning to see it. Lots of festivities around and excitement was in the air. There was a small parade leading the torch. It was exciting to see this and I’m happy we were able to go.

Yesterday morning, the bell ringers rang Big Ben 40 times over three minutes, while people across London rang their handbells alongside. Everyone here is so excited that it has become contagious. I admit to being the scrooge about the Olympics knowing it was going to make the traffic worse than it already is and the tube more stinky and crowded during rush hour (which is hard to believe!). But because of all the positive energy and enthusiasm, I will proudly admit, I am fully on board! I even stayed up until 1am to watch the full opening ceremonies.

Scott has secured tickets for us to an event and tomorrow I think we will probably go watch the Olympic bike race that goes very near to the house with the kids. I find myself pulling for both the USA and the UK (and admittedly cheered inside when the Dutch walked in the procession). I hope it is fun and safe for everyone. So far, it has certainly been inspiring.

I just came to realize it has been almost an entire month without an update. It seems only last week that we were having our 10 year first date anniversary. So much has happened since then!

The most memorable and fun thing was that Scott surprised me with a re-do of our first date once I returned from Washington DC. He had La Griglia menus sent directly from Houston so we could re-do our Italian dinner (even remembering what we ate that night and having the chefs prepare it) as well as Treana wine which several of our very dear friends helped him sneak into the UK. We even went from our Italian feast to a low-key bar, complete with a Kay’s sign made for the occasion. I was shocked and of course burst into tears like the little girls who see Justin Bieber… What a wonderful night we had, both 10 years ago and on our re-do.

We finished off our anniversary with a quick weekend trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. We ate. We drank. We slept. We had a blast having no responsibilities and just hanging out. Scott loved the castle up on the cliff, and I too had a good time re-exploring it.

It was a good weekend indeed. A perfect top off for our anniversary week. The only ick factor was the haggis…

We welcomed Michelle B into our home. She will be helping with the kids and exploring London when she isn’t busy. The kids like her a great deal and she is a very good calming source for Caden. She’s very quiet so we hope we don’t run her off with our organized chaos!

Shortly after that, I had a quick work trip to Dublin. Some really big work news went down while I was there, but I’ll save that for a later post. It has been quite an emotional roller coaster at work lately which seems to be calming down to some degree.

The kids just yesterday have wrapped up school for the year. Caden finished up Year 1 (equivalent to kindergarten in the USA) and Keali compoleted Reception (pre-k 4). They both can read and write whole sentences, and both excel at math. Keali is considerably better at writing than Caden was at her age simply due to not skipping around schools and grades during the foundation year. He has made tremendous progress though. We are very proud of how much he has done in just a few short months. The teachers at school finally agreed with us that he is dyslexic. While there are varying degrees of dyslexia, Caden has already developed a ton of coping mechanisms to overcome this. Yesterday we found a specialist in dyslexia who will work with him through the summer to ensure his incredible forward progress is continued. Once his writing and spelling are better aligned with his amazing intellect, he’ll be in a good place. A friend of mine at work turned me onto “The Gift of Dyslexia”. As soon as I read it, I was amazed at how many things in the book described Caden as well as how lucky he is to have what some might consider a disability.

London is preparing for the Olympics which start in just a couple of weeks. The traffic which is normally kind of bad is already worse. We are excited about seeing the events that Scott was able to get tickets for, but certainly dreading the extra 6 million people expected to arrive in this city of already 12 million.

On a less happy note, I learned last night that my grandmother isn’t expected to live more than a few more days. She lived independently and at home until she was well over 90. In the last couple of years, she has been in a nursing home and recently suffered a relatively severe stroke. I know she wouldn’t want to live as she is currently “living”. As sad as it is to say good-bye, I think she would want her pride and humility restored by leaving this world. It will however be a very sad day for the family. Many of my Lunt qualities come from her and her side of the family, and some are probably more desirable than others. But we are who we are. I hope I can live independently and as healthily as she did until 90+.

A couple of our good friends from Houston visited us over the last weekend. Tanya and Darin are our neighbors in Texas and it was fun to see some friendly Texan faces.

We had a big time exploring bits of London that we hadn’t yet seen. We hit the Winston Churchill War Rooms museum for a start. Those of you who know me very well know that history isn’t my first love. Or second. Or really any part of like. Much more into science and maths, I feel anything that happened before about 1950 seems too long ago to worry much about. (Yes, I know the adage about history repeating itself, but it doesn’t remove the boredom associated with knowing about it.)

The War rooms were actually fairly interesting. Even for me. That says something, folks.

We took a little hop-on, hop-off bus in order to score some good pictures for another friend’s from Houston Flat Stanley project. Additionally that weekend, we were able to make it to another rugby game at the local fields.

The highlight of the weekend (aside from the company) was the day trip we took to Stonehenge and Bath. Stonehenge is believed to have been constructed before 1500 BC. The older it is to me, the less time/attention I have for it. So we walked out to see it, snapped a picture, and then waited for Tanya and Darin to finish up. It was unseasonly cold and rainy so Scott was happy to wait in the car with me!

We then drove on to Bath where we walked around the very old and beautiful town. The Abbey church was a beautiful building, but the center part of the town was the Roman Baths. The baths are built around a naturally forming hot springs. The water is at a constant 35 degrees Celsius. It really was amazing how something so elaborate could have been built so long ago. The Romans even used the heat from the water rising up to heat the rooms of the structures. Even for this low-level history interest, it was something to be seen. The cold beer at the pub when we finished was equally entertaining.

Tanya and Darin went on to tour Scotland and will be returning to Texas tomorrow. We wish them safe travels!

UPDATE: Just as I was about to post this – I realized that somehow I managed to exclude the true best part of their visit! On Saturday afternoon, we set out to go to St Paul’s Cathedral. Perhaps not surprisingly, we were distracted with a quick stop at a very cool old pub. This lead us to abort the plan to go to St Paul’s and instead do a pub crawl in order to get a free t-shirt. We are still missing one pub stop which Scott and I will “force” ourselves to go to, so that we can send Darin his t-shirt!

The video highlights:

We had a three day bank weekend, so we decided to head to the country. After many hours of searching the internet for pseudo-nearby castles, we finally settled on going towards Bath/Bristol area to Bradford-Upon-Avon. There was a “family friendly” manor house hotel.

The house was beautiful and huge! But the thing that most impressed me was the “family friendly” hotel part. The Brits know how to do family friendly! There was an indoor pool which the kids loved (an outdoor one too but it was tooooo cold), a trampoline, two or three fields for football and cricket, two different kids clubs rooms with toys and games, two different playgrounds, kids menus, and even a dog and a hamster on property.

We explored some of the area around the house/hotel as well. Bradford is a quaint little English town with some beautiful and stereotypical buildings. We had a great and relaxing weekend for all four of us.

We had a great weekend. We attended our first rugby match. Let me just say: wow!

It was an absolute blast. Keali was glued to it! She loved watching the players tackle and get so rough with each other. Our aggressive kid on the other hand could not have cared less. Instead, he opted to play iPad throughout most of the game. We attended a league game that is a level or two below a professional, i.e. one level below NFL in rugby talk…

The action was literally feet away from us. The power and the hits of these guys without any padding was amazing. It was so fun and we hope to attend the next match in the fields near our house. Loooooving the sports here. (Cricket season starts next weekend. *****snooooooozzzzzzeeeee****)

A quick video of the highlights…