Summer Fun

One of the best things about living on base so far has been having friends close by.  Our last neighborhood off base didn't really have any little kids.  Luke and Ella have loved being able to run across the street or down the street to grab a buddy when they're bored.  

Meet the 3 amigos.  Hunter, Cole, and Luke.  They spent summer days building weapons and coming up with war strategies.  They hop on their bikes and frequent the park to plan their attacks. 

Ella wakes up asking when Amelia can come over.  She lives two houses down, and the girls like to run back and forth between houses.  Here they were one day dancing on the trampoline.

Cute little friends.  Life is good when you can run around with a buddy in your swimsuit (with ice cream all over your face) and dance all afternoon!

Legoland Windsor

Luke, Ella, and I went with some friends to Windsor for a couple of days last week for a Legoland trip!  Linda talked me into going, and I'm glad she did.  It was a fun summer hoorah for the kidos before school starts next week.  Jake and Michael couldn't miss work and could care less about Legoland really, so we did it sans husbands.  Legoland has a pretty good deal going now where you buy a day and get a day free. You get a killer deal on a hotel room close by too.  Pretty nice.  It's only a two hour drive to Windsor, but it's nice not to have to drive all the way back home after a long park day.  The first day there it rained.  Awesome because there were pretty much no lines.  The second day was nice and sunny, and the park was a zoo.  I'm only going again if it's a rainy day or if British school is in session!  

  

So we don't forget our fun little trip, here are some pictures...

Here's Maryn, Hayden, Dallen, Bennet, Luke, and Ella posing with the Lego family.  So cool that you can make practically anything with Legos.      

On the little bumper cars they ask the kids how old they are before they can go and claim a car.  Ella told the guy she was 2, only to be told she was too little to ride.  Have to be 3-5 yrs for this one.  She was sooo sad.  Poor kid had to watch Luke and Hayden ride and sobbed the whole time.  So, since she's just a week and a half shy of being 3, the next day we fibbed and said she was 3.  She was so proud of her 'drivers license' they gave her at the end.  Well worth our little white lie.  Ha.  

And here she was in action.   :)

Luke says his favorite ride was the big boat.  These things give me crazy stomach tickles!  I love them.  Glad he likes them as much as I do!  He has become a lot more adventurous in the last year as far as doing stuff like this goes!  The fun thing about Legoland is that if you're 5, you're tall enough to go on everything.  Here he was in the back row with Linda and Ben.  

These little containers were everywhere around the park.  I didn't know that people recycle gum. That is beyond gross.  I feel for whoever has to clean out the gum recycling balls.  

So, they have this building there that has a wall of Lego portraits of famous people.  I think the one of David Beckham looks exactly like Jake.  Weird since they don't look alike in person.  Check it out.  #10 Lego man looks like Jake, huh?  

Small land was my favorite.  They have Lego cities highlighting a lot of countries.  

Cutie Lego Queen...

Luke and Hayden are best buds.  Here they are on the Laser Raider ride.

And on the swings.  Ella was terrified of these.  

Glad I got to spend a few fun days with my munchkins and our friends before school starts.  Good times!

my little puddle jumper

Doesn't matter if we're on our way into church, a store, if the water is on the street and has oil floating on it, or if it's in our backyard. There is no stopping Ella when it comes to puddle jumping! A week or so ago she was putting on her wellies to go outside, so I grabbed the camera and followed her around. She even climbed up on the play table to jump in all the little puddles on there.  Love my little girl!  Ü

 

A Saturday at Buckingham Palace

The Queen goes to Edinburgh for August and September, so Buckingham Palace is open to visitors.  Jake and I went with the kidos on Saturday to tour the state rooms.  Pretty fun.   Earlier in the week watching the news about all the riots going on in the country, I wasn't sure we'd be able to go into the city.  Luckily, things calmed down and we didn't have to change our Saturday plans.  Our tickets were for the 12:30 tour.  Since we got there earlier in the morning, we had time to play at St. James Park and to watch the changing of the guard before going inside.  Here's the palace.  Seems like every time I go to the palace, there's construction going on in front.

My 3 cuties in front of the gate.  We somehow managed to lose both Ella's jacket and Luke's umbrella before the day was over.  Losing stuff on day trips is a talent we've acquired here.

I just like this one of Luke with the guard in the background :)

These next couple of pictures aren't the greatest quality, but I like them anyway.  I was holding Ella up so she could see with one of my arms... the other arm was taking pictures.  Since we didn't stake out a spot an hour early for the changing of the guard, we stood behind some other tourists to see.

Inside the palace was very cool.  Not as gaudy as Versailles, but a lot fancier than the White House.  We saw Kate's dress, shoes, and wedding jewelry since they're on display now.  Fun to see them in person.  She's even tinier than I thought!  The waist in that dress is teeny.   William and Kate's wedding cake is on display, too.  Very pretty but probably wouldn't taste so great... traditional English wedding cake is fruit cake.  haha.  No photography is allowed inside the palace, so we just took some pictures once outside in the back gardens.

I love all the trees here.  Here's one from the palace gardens...

After we left the grounds at Buckingham, we went over to see the Science Museum.  We didn't stay long since we were hungry, but they've got some cool stuff.  One of these days we will have to go back.  We were in the transportation area most of our time there.  Thought these cars were cutie.

Old school dental equipment.  Looks like it belongs on a Dr. Seuss movie.

This church building serves most of the London area.  It's across the st. from the science museum.

There are areas in London where you can see where bombs took out parts of buildings in WWII. 

Check out the shrapnel damage to this building.

Riding in a cab..

Playing around at St. James park.  There are tons of greedy squirrels and birds there.  They are super cute and will come up to grab food from you.  The kids love it.  I love it too.  Reminds me of feeding squirrels at the cabin!

 

After eating dinner at Pierinos and stopping for an ice cream at the Creperie, we went back to the park for a little bit before catching the bus home. 

And then, school FINALLY was out for summer!

British schools got out for summer holiday July 22. 
I snapped a picture of Luke and his reception teacher, Mr. Stratford, on the last day of school. 

We have really liked Mr. Stratford.  Luke learned so much this past year!  Going to school here has been a great experience.  He'll start Kindergarten on Sept. 6 on base.  After a lot of going back and forth on whether to keep him at the same British primary school or to put him in elementary school on base, we decided on putting him in American kindergarten.  We're looking forward to having him home with us on the American holidays, and when Jake has family days off work!  We'll be able to do quite a bit more traveling this way.  Not to mention the school is a short walk from our house.  I'm hoping he won't be too bored.  British schools are way ahead of those in the States.  During the early school years anyway.  I guess we'll see how it goes!   
 

I don't want to forget this house.

 15 Kingfisher Way was good to us! 

We moved in last October and stayed until a little over a week ago.   It's really in the perfect location.  Just a couple of minutes walk to the market and to the local grocery store, the community pool, the river, and great parks.  Mildenhall is a charming little village and we made lots of fun memories there.  So, I've got to get pictures of it down in the blog book. 

Last week we moved a whopping seven minutes away to be on base.  We were never planning on moving on base, but when we saw the house they offered us, we wanted to be here.  It just felt right.  Friends close by for the kids, convenience, and a washer and dryer in the house trumped the cute village atmosphere. 

We're loving our new place, but I don't want to forget the cute house we left.  It was a great experience living off base for 10 months.  I took this picture a couple of weeks before we moved.  I went outside to get a pic of the house and when the kids heard the front door open, they came looking for me.  A few seconds later Jake came stomping out totally unaware that I was trying to get a picture of the house... just mad because he found some marker on the carpet or something.  haha. Check out the fist.  I thought it was a funny moment to catch on the camera!  Good one of the house though, right? :) 

Here are all the rooms downstairs.  Cute and little.  Every room has a door on the outside and if they're all shut, you walk into the house and it's like a cave!  haha.  English homes are very segmented. 

I'm going to miss the double convection oven in the kitchen!  I had finally gotten used to cooking in Celsius and adjusting for the convection.  Not going to miss the tiny washing machine in the kitchen or the super shallow kitchen sink  Or the wonky light fixtures.  Other than the kitchen and living room, there's a tiny dining room and a little office space we used as a piano room.   Oh, and one glorious tiny coat closet graced the hallway.  Those are hard to come by in English homes.  Even houses like this that were built 10 years ago.

This was upstairs.  Our bedroom/master bath, Luke & Ella's room, our 'office', and an extra little bedroom.  I never got into decorating this house.  Couldn't gather enough motivation!  Glad I didn't go through the trouble since we ended up moving so soon.  

The kid's bedroom had one little closet in it, but that's it as far as closets went in this house upstairs.  The military gives you a wardrobe for each bedroom in the house that doesn't have a closet.  These are the beauties Jake and I had to keep our clothes in.  They  took up a third of our room.  It's crazy how roomy it feels now that we don't have wardrobes and can use closets.

The bathrooms in England have zero storage cabinets/drawers.  We just stored everything in baskets.  Our new place on base has so much bathroom storage we don't know what to do with it all!  This was the other bathroom upstairs.

Random bathroom note:  Bathrooms in England have no outlets in them.  It's illegal.  So, you have to do hair and get ready for the day in another room of the house.  Also, there's rarely a light switch in bathrooms off base.  You get to pull one of these cutie strings to turn on the light.  You can't see it really good in this picture, but there's a bathroom string for ya.

Living off base, whenever you need to plug in a hair dryer, toaster, iron, etc. you have to lug this 25 lb transformer to an outlet to do so.  Some items are dual voltage (like some computers and a few other electronics) and you only have to use a small adaptor for those.  One time I accidentally dropped a transformer on the floor of our room when I was going upstairs to do my hair.  It tore through the carpet AND crushed some of the wood underneath!  I was sooo grateful it didn't land on my foot.  Those things are beasts.  Totally would have crushed my bones!  Transformers, I'm not going to miss you guys.  On base we have both American and British outlets.  Awesomeness.  No more hauling these things up and down the stairs to do hair or to use the toaster!

Some Americans are bugged by the bathroom/kitchen water situation off base.  I've never cared that the hot and cold sides aren't mixed together when coming out of the tap.  Seems like a weenie thing to complain about to me.  I kind of like washing my face with cold!  Seems so old school that they still do this though instead of letting you have warm water out of the tap.  It's super hot on one side and freezing on the other.  The British way to wash hands is to plug the sink and fill it with the hot and cold so that you've got warm water.  The thought of washing my hands in a little hand bath grosses me out.  Especially in public restrooms/sinks.  I'd rather just use cold water.  Anyway, for memory's sake, here's one of the fun faucets in the house.  This one is from the tub.  You can see that the hot and cold don't come together!

  

I'm going to miss the trees in front of our house in Mildenhall!   I loved them.  One thing that drew me in to this house was that we didn't have anyone across the street from us. 

  

   

Now we've got the forest behind us and cookie cutter houses in front.  Fun people live across the st from us now though, so it's all good :)  We're liking it so far here.  Much easier to keep clean and organized, that's for sure! I'll post pictures of our new place one of these days.  All I've got left to do is hang pictures!