The New Pond

Last week's heavy rain created a new pond in our back yard.  Lucas LOVES playing in water, and couldn't stay out of it.  Then Jack joined in.

Jack is looking so handsome and grown up.

Misc. Around Home

Reading bedtime stories

Here's me at 25 weeks, just before Aaron left on his 4-week trip.

We had some nice weather while he was gone. We spent a lot of time outside at the playground, riding bikes, and enjoying our new back yard.

I was thrilled when I found these gorgeous locally grown berries at the village market. Jack really loves raspberries, and enjoyed eating them with a little blueberry stuffed inside.

Lucas started attending the Preschool in our village 3 mornings a week, and really enjoys it.  (In some places it is called Playgroup or Nursery.)

It's good that these boys have each other.  They are always playing together when they are home.

We have some gorgeous autumn color in our neighborhood.  The white fence is our driveway.

Getting bigger, about 30-31 weeks.

Aaron had a birthday, and the boys put the candles on the cake.

Jack loves to play knights and dress up in any costume.  In the birthday photo above he is wearing his skeleton mask.

Jack has really started getting into drawing, coloring, and writing.  He spent most of Sunday doing that.

34.5 weeks, and now wearing Aaron's T-shirts instead of my own.  We have the Lazy-Boy in the computer room, so now we spend the evenings together there.  Aaron has been writing on his collaborative MormonDems blog, and I have been studying my HypnoBabies course to prepare for my upcoming natural birth.

London Temple Trip

Our stake had a temple weekend recently.  On Saturday morning the Primary held an activity on the temple grounds for all the kids so the parents could go through.  It's a 2+ hour drive to the London Temple without traffic, and they have lodging there on the grounds.

Walking around the temple grounds after just arriving.

These orange flowers are the ones my Grandma Higgs always had in her garden pots.  They reminded me of her.

I caused some excitement in the morning stake temple session when I was kneeling and fainted backwards in front of a room full of people.  Also on this trip Jack got his first bee sting.

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On Saturday afternoon we went to an English Heritage site nearby.  We have the membership, and had been wanting to see this -- the home of Charles Darwin.  Inside the home were some museum-like rooms about Darwin's life, in addition to the furnished rooms where he worked and lived.  Outside they had extensive gardens and a greenhouse.

Driving towards home, this is a two-lane road.  This is very typical in England.  The road is so small that you have to stop and pull over when a car comes the other direction.  The problem is, there are no shoulders!

Our New Place

[Harmony writing now.  Thanks to Aaron for posting all our travels.]
Our new village is charming, and full of old English character.  All the homes are stone and some have thatched roofs.  Our house is from the year 1800.  Now we really feel like we're living in England.

Across the street from our house is this little village church (whose bells ring every hour around the clock), situated behind the village hall and this little playground.  We were at this playground nearly every day during the summer break when the weather was nice.  When the boys get on this train, they pretend to drive to Italy, Germany, or Islip (our old village).  This ivy-covered building is a house down the street.  It's a small village; it only takes about 5 minutes to walk to the end of it.

Climbing up to look at the horses.

Dog-pile on Dad!

We have some friends in the pasture behind our back yard.

Scotland: Loch Lomond

On our last day in Scotland, we hiked up a hill near the Loch Lomond & the Trossachs National Park visitor's center for a fabulous, but wet view of the lake and some of its islands. It rained most of that day (and for much of our trip), but as they say in the UK, there's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, so we trudged our way up the muddy path to this lookout halfway up the trail. You can't let the rain stop you from doing things over here. Scotland was wonderful, but we found out during our trip that we were going to be kicked out of our house in August (the landlord wanted to move back in), so we spent the rest of our summer searching for a house, prepping and then moving, hence the delay in these posts.

(R) Jack was way ahead of us. 

(L) Part of the mud path we trekked (R) The rest of the way up from the lookout point where we took the photos below. We didn't go to the top. Maybe next time, when the boys are a little bigger.

(L) Lucas ended up hitching a ride up part of the way. 

(R) Rather than following the trail the same way back, we walked straight ahead from where I was standing here down the hill and towards the lake until we reached the road.

(Above) Muddy hikers