Forbes Fulham Fun

Nothing like 6 months to keep the blog up...

2010-03-27T12:16:00.003Z

Basically we're boring people; it takes six months for enough "blog worthy" events to transpire to make it worth doing a post. So, here's what's been happening:

Aidan has continued to be an all star at school. Well, he's a normal, bright kid and he is now reading like a champ. Mom (Grammy) - you will be so excited to have him read to you! Both Jamie and I love taking him to school; it's about 20 minutes in total and 10 or so is spent on the b

us when we get to have him read him school book with us. I realized a little while ago that he was pretending to sound out words that he could easily read because we would have him do that when he first started learning. Now he just reads, some things quite easily; so easily I think that some things he has just memorized, but some he is actually reading. What an amazing skill that even 4 year olds can acquire.

Oliver has become a big jibber-jabber with some definitive English words being spoken. And I mean Queen's English; the other day he pointed to his finger and said, "Hurt" with a dropped/soft R and everything. Precious. The two of the together is becoming more and more fun as they are able to play, communicate and fight like real brothers. Aidan is very protective of his little brother and is always very cautious when getting on and off the bus and tube, being sure to hold the door for him. I think he was traumatized during our last holiday, more below...

Jamie is still a super star with her work; she is in some super-star position that she essentially wrote for herself. She is doing a little bit o

f everything now, managing the minions in the London office, going on sales trips with the sales people, and now speaking as an industry expert at conferences. Well, at least I say she's an industry expert, but she seems pretty knowledgable and has spoken at a few different event over that last year or so. She rocks her job and just sit back and boast about her.

I am now just living as a kept man, getting manicures and highlights twice a week. Yeah right! While not nearly as prestigious I am still assisting in buying wine at Whole Foods Market in London. I work at the flagship with a massive wine dept, about 1200 listings at the moment with capacity for about 1500. I've been there a year now which is a great thing because job stability was missing from life in London. It makes life a whole bunch easier.

Other big events: Oliver turned 2 on the 2nd of January, which was a fun celebration, mostly with friends from pastorate. He mostly didn't care, he was just excited to be eating little cakes at 10 in the morning.

Here he is blowing out the candles in his little store bought cakes.

I've got to go to work now, so I'll post part two later. Hopefully not 6 months later.

Cheers!

Nothing like that fresh from the hamper taste...

2009-09-23T22:34:00.002+01:00

Aidan went home after school with a friend to have a playdate and dinner. When they got to his friend True's house True's mom gave the boys some rice cakes as a snack. They were labeled "Savoury flavour" and that was it. So after gnawing on it for a bit, Aidan hands it back to Michelle and says with a straight face, "I don't like that, it tastes like it's been in a bag with my dad's dirty laundry." After picking herself up off the floor after laughing, she took a closer look at the rice cake package--turns out they were Marmite flavoured...

Cheers!

Muli bwanji?

2009-09-18T07:10:00.003+01:00

Had a chance to hang out and discuss our trip to Malawi with the Fergs. For those of you who don't know, we are going to be going to Malawi to do a GAT trip. Rather than explain that, here's the link. Malawi is such an amazing country, with awesome people. It is called the "Warm heart of Africa" for a reason. We are excited that God's wanting to do this. The other beni is that Jamie's super prego sister Lindsay will be there and we'll get a chance to see her and the b.i.l., Nick.

So, be praying for some more people to come together to form the team. Be praying that the Malawian team on the ground is getting stuff ready, like organizing and inviting people to this training time. That will help us with specific times, dates and places. Then only after you've prayed for those thing you can think about praying for the finance end to come together.

And as you're reading this and you feel like you're an answer to prayer, please don't hesitate to get a hold of us. Here's an awesome pic of Malawi:

This is a waterfall at the base of Mount Mulanje. I'll get some of our pics up here once I get them on this computer.

Cheers!

Sleep Stories and First Days

2009-09-09T12:05:00.005+01:00

Aidan's first day of school was Monday. Check it out:

He is a precious little lamb! His creativity has been going wild in the past few weeks. Last night as we were getting ready for bed he was talking about the "sleep stories" he was going to have that night. Apparently that's what he calls dreams. Precious. Another highlight of bedtime last night was opening up his imgainary book while on Jamie's lap. He read, "The Lion and the beanstalk." The Lion climbed up the beanstalk, ate the Giant's food and the Giant ate the Lion's leg. Aidan tells it way better than me...

Cheers!

Grammy get yer gun!

2009-08-27T09:20:00.004+01:00

Aidan just received a back-to-school present from Grammy Forbes this week. So we are trying to teach our kids some etiquette and send thank you cards for gifts. So as Aidan is creating his card, drawing a picture on it of a dog. Aidan says, "Yeah, cause Grammy likes dogs." Soon another shape appeared next to the dog. Jamie - "Is that a stick for the dog?" Aidan - "No mommy, it's a gun. Yeah, cause Grammy likes guns." As intuitive as ever, Aidan picks up on our snickerings at that comment and says, "Don't be silly mommy! Yeah, Don't be DAFT Mommy!"* At which Jamie fell on the floor and had to spit out her coffee or choke laughing.

We have hilarious children...

And, speaking of back to school, Aidan's school clothes just came in the mail. This year he is in "Reception", like Kindergarten but a year early. But this means that he has proper uniform this year. Adorable kit, so we'll get him dressed and take some pictures soon.

Cheers!

*Please reference our englishisms if you don't see the humor in a 4-year old saying this.

August is slow...

2009-08-18T14:59:00.002+01:00

Everything gets really quiet in August here in London. Loads of tourists, but not a whole lot of work going on. Kids are still on break, Jamie's not travelling, and WFM is experiencing the real summer slowdown. In fact, one of our reps came in to compare retail prices and we happened to be tasting wines from another vendor, which he tasted through with us as he didn't really have to be anywhere.

Aidan has been kitted out for reception, which is like kidergarten only a year sooner. For a four year old, school clothing bill = £160, plus he still needs some shoes. But, it will be worth all the picture we get to take of him in his classic schoolboy outfit - high socks, shorts, shirt and tie with blazer. Precious.

One cool thing on the horizon is that Nat (our nanny for those not in the the know) is heading to Burundi for a GAT trip. Our church now organizes Global Alpha Training courses for churches in countries all over to be taught how to run the Alpha course in their churches. It's pretty cool as both a cross cultural ministry trip, but also because Alpha is so basic, everyone can adapt it their church's/country's context. So Nat is excited to be heading to Africa and we are stoked for her. In addition, Jamie and I are pretty sure to be going to Malawi in November for a GAT trip. We will take the boys and Judy will come out too to look after them and then stick around to be with Lindsay as she will be giving birth soon after. Prayers for normal birth, no Aidan incidents...

One random thought before finishing: I was on the tube coming home the other day and being one of the rare hot days we've had in London, lots of people were wearing sandals. And as making eye contact on the tube is a huge social faux pas, I ended up looking at lots of feet and realized:

a) London is still a pretty dirty town based on the gross feet of those sandal-wearers,
b) feet are pretty ugly - in addition to the dirt, callouses, messed up toenails, scars, blisters, deformities from wearing too tight shoes with too high heels, and generally weird shaped feet (akin to Ben Mangrum's freaky index toes--you know what I mean), I've never been grossed out by feet the way Jamie is, but I'm starting to see her point.
c) life and the human condition is like a pair a feet- with the inherent ability to dance, run, and perform other amazing abilities (bipedal locomotion is amazingly complex) yet still full of pain, dirt, and general ugliness. It puts Jesus washing the disciples feet in a whole new light. He says to Peter, "You don't realize now what I'm doing, but later you will understand." Do you think Peter had a chance to reflect on how gross feet are? It gives new perspective to Isaiah's words: "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news."
d) I need a new pair of sandals.

Cheers!

Focus Focus

2009-08-08T00:46:00.003+01:00

We've been a week home from Focus, our church's All-church Holiday north of London and are still recovering from the awesomeness that is Focus. Jamie had a chance to be a normal attendee this year; I was still kicking it with the younger youth.
Highlights:

Brad getting to see some young men grow in their relationships with Christ and their desire to know him more. Awesome!
Seeing Aidan ride his new bike everywhere (and Oliver on his tail on the scooter).
Aidan's birthday on Friday -- (he got to open grandparents presents) put on Gary and Judy's gift (a football/soccer uniform) then put on Larry and Carole's gift (spiderman outfit), proceeded to play until dinner and then crash in the buggy at the dining hall before eating a bite.
Naps every day for the whole family
"chalet" parties - don't get too excited. Our "chalets" are the little one-bedroom teeny hotel-like rooms (with rock hard mattresses) that we stay in. No fridge's but one little 10-inch TV that at least gets cbeebies. Best part about chalets is that lunch's are on your own so all of your neighbors (chalets are connected) that face the same green sprawl out with their cheese and wine and sandwiches and watch kids together and get to know one another. They purposefully try to put you by people in similar life stages, so we had several other little 1 and 4 year olds around. Those are chalet parties.
Amazing teaching - Pastor Agu, Bishop of London, Mike Pilavachi, Pete Greig and Shane Claiborne (not to mention HTB's very own Nicky Gumbel!) were some of Jamie's faves.
Definitely saw the Spirit move and stir up His vision for His kingdom. Theme was on "Transformation" so lots of talks about how you can transform society, your neighborhood, yourself. Cool stuff!

Definitely a tradition to think about bringing back...lots of love!
Forbes

The "Drop In"

2009-07-13T20:56:00.002+01:00

One of the great things about being American is that informality is built into our social nature. The British are quite a bit more formal. Example: our friends Paul and Jules are some of the coolest people we know, but call them at 2pm and try to invite them over for dinner that night- yeah right! I think they've shut us down like 100 times. So I was pleasantly surprised when Ali Marshall, a friend from church, and his sister and mom stopped by to hang out at like 5, 5:30 tonight. His mom was all apologetic, such a cute English mom! Even better, Ali started making tea for all of us.
It makes me miss the 'hood and running over to the Koetje's just to hang....

Cheers!

Shingles! What the heck?

2009-06-30T13:03:00.002+01:00

The week after I crashed my bike I got what I thought was a rash on my stomach. Nope. Shingles. So freaking random! So I'm itchy and my skin's pretty sensetive, but I had anti-viral meds to take care of it; hopefully it will work.

Some fun tidbits:
-I got to select wine for Dave Matthews Band the other day. Actually it was for a roadie filling out dressing room requests. But just in case you're curious, he's drinking a Seghesio Zinfandel. I wanted to suggest something from Washington since he lives there, but the roadie didn't really care about wine or DMB.

-Jamie and I got asked to give a Marriage Course testimony at the final party that we do. It was pretty fun getting to describe what we got out of the course, even though our story was relatively plain.

-It is ripping hot here! It pretty funny to hear news reports freaking out about mid to high 80s. But with the confined spaces on trains and stuff does get pretty sick. Just hot and humid; it's a sauna in your work clothes! Sweat dripping down the back of you legs and back and you haven't even got to work yet. Ahh, London summers....

-Mark and Amy, our great Australian friends, have left London forever-not a fun tidbit. But we are happy that they get a chance to explore the US before they resettle in Australia outside of Sydney and start having babies :)

-We're trying to plan a clandestine 4th of July party with our expat friends from church. We're actually going to do it on the 5th for pragmatic purposes. Of course, we have a stock take this weekend so I get to spend a night helping count all our wine. Happy 4th of July to me! And no softball either. They don't do that here.

-Jamie's rolling to Tokyo again in a week or two to work her Index magic. Her free miles have got to be huge this year!

That's about all the menutia I can think of at this point; Aidan is talking constantly about his birthday a month out and Oliver is just talking constantly or at least babbling and almost-talking. He said clearly, "Hi" to some random girl who walked by while waiting in the doctors office. Hilarious because he would do that with a dude. Shameless flirt....

I'm going to go enjoy the sun before it disappears...

Cheers!

You should have seen the other guy....

2009-06-22T09:59:00.004+01:00

On Saturday I safely crashed my bike into a stupid lady driving a Mercedes. Safely crashed is a bit of an oxymoron, but I managed to come away unscathed, however bent my bike's frame. The killer is that it was totally her fault and I let her go before grabbing any details as I was simply relived to be in tact and not bleeding. It was a little more shaking that a car on car fender bender, even though ultimately the damage was the same. So no details exchanged and me sitting on the side of the road catching my breath, restoring my heart rate to normal. Now I have to go in to a police station and see if they might have CCTV of the incident.

All that made me very late for our friends Mark and Amy's going away BBQ which was at our house. I hobbled home on my barely working bike and came in with black greasy hands from putting my chain back on and looking rather haggard. I was really bummed for the evening and even more sad that Mark and Amy were leaving in a week! On top of that, my back was all messed up from moving loads of stock after we had a big wine sale last weekend and ordered about 2-3 times our normal stock holdings. Still have a little tweak which is slowly getting better.

Other fun news: Natalie Flath, one of Jamie's small group girls from UPPC and a friend from SPU stayed with us for a couple nights to see London as they were on their way to work at a camp in Grenoble, France for July. Great to see them and always fun to see old youth group kids all grown up!

Lastly, we just heard that Aidan is going to get in to St John's for recpetion. I'll do a whole blog on school admittance here in the UK and the insanity it involves. The US school system is not as bad as you think it is...trust me.

Cheers!

P.S. On Sat at the BBQ (when I started this post) had a Los Altos Hormigas Malbec from Argentina, like '06, '07. Awesome wine with a great deep flavor, some spicer and firm tannic stucture. Then on Monday (as I finished this post) had a Ridge Lytton Springs (Zin blend) 2006 previously in the evening with Jamie on our date night (thanks to Nat for watching the sleeping babes.).

2006 Spier Shiraz

2009-06-15T23:33:00.003+01:00

Tonight was the final session of "The Marriage Course" which is like Alpha for marriage--well not really, it really is just a marriage course. Not to disparage it by calling it just a marriage course; it is well organized and researched and has awesome content for us to work on. So I encourage those of you at UPPC who are married to get involved in running it because it is easy to do and then easy to invite work relations to.

I've decided to sample a wine while writing new posts; nothing like mixing business with pleasure. But which one in which.... Tonight is a Spier Shiraz, 2006. I think I'll also name each post after the wine, because my title creations have been lame recently. Tell me if it gets annoying. Not great but serviceable. I was afraid it would be great because I know the supplier which handles classics like Sutter Home. Mmmmm...

It has been an awesome week in London and good weather means that we get some great time in our back garden, barbecueing and just enjoying summer. Last night (Sunday) happened to be one of those times. So we made burgers and had an awesome Torrontes (Argentinian wine varietal) and Aidan came up with this corker: "We're having a picnic so we get to eat outside...(pause)...yeah and I don't have a bedtime." Nice try kid, thought you could slip that one by mommy and daddy while enjoying some hot sun and cold wine (Jamie wants to be clear - she and I enjoying the wine, though we do let Aidan smell our wine and do "cheers" with his juice :)).

On that note,
Cheers!

After 9 years you think you know someone....

2009-06-09T22:26:00.001+01:00

Jamie just admitted to me that she has no idea what TRON is...This is a sad day for me....

More Famous People in London

2009-06-06T00:23:00.003+01:00

Dustin Hoffman was in Whole Foods Kensington two days ago. Pushing his own cart and everything. Besides that, life has been settling down a bit in London for the Forbes'. That's a relative term with Jamie's job though. She's been to Singapore for a week and Paris and probably a few other places too. I have a hard time keeping track.

May 20th was our 9th anniversary! Crazy to think we've been married that long, it has flown by! We went out to dinner at a restaurant called Racine, which Jamei had been to a couple times before for work stuff (must be rough...). We had oysters and Champagne to start, which was a first for me! We had some meal for two, veal I think, but one of the best bits was the spinach blended with foie gras. Yum! The wine we got was so-so, probably a bit over priced for what it was.

Speaking of meals (It's now a big part of my work, which is fun) the wine team went out for a work dinner last Sunday and went to this BYO place that does one thing-rotisserie chicken. The basic-ness of it allows wine to show off, and since it is BYO, it a place where all the wine trade people go to eat. Random. Anyways, we had a couple awesome wine; first we shared a 1990 Corton Charlemagne which is an old Chardonnay. Rich, but still had fresh fruit along with nice caramel notes and hints of spice. Very interesting as I really don't enjoy much Chardonnay. Red wine was a 1978 Volnay, an even older Red Burgundy/Pinot Noir. Still fresh, with earthy, mushroom aromas and raspberry. The aroma/perfume on old burgundy is amazing an unlike any Pinot Noir from around the world. Expensive French wine is still worth it, even if the lower end stuff I think is rubbish.

Aside from that, Nat Lewington, our new live-in nanny continues to amaze. It has been really fun getting to know her and be able to bless her with the chance to do ministry/fellowship by living with us. She is doing a bible study with a girls she met while leading alpha which meets while Jamie and I do marriage course stuff. She has been kicking it with her friends every night this week. Aidan and Ollie love her too and she has been awesome at being loving but tough with a cheeky three year old...

In addition to all this fun stuff, I surprised Jamie with a belated surprise party the second weekend in May. Made sure it was nice and late so she wouldn't suspect... Really, it was a) for our friends in London and b) hoping to hold out for nicer weather. It was cold and rainy the whole time. Ah, England. It was also "fancy dress", a costume theme party, in safari style. I found these surprisingly nice pith helmets on line for cheap and now just have them lying around for the boys to play with. I'm thinking of ways to integrate them into my daily attire. I could be "that guy who wears a pith helmet."

One final note- this post has taken forever to write. The two days ago afore mentioned was actually now about 2 weeks ago. I'll try to post small and steady from now on.

Cheers!

Pictures from past 3 months

2009-05-24T15:41:00.004+01:00

Just to recap: Jamie bought me/us a camera for Valentines Day/Holidays/because we needed one. Our old point and shoot camera was like 10megs, which is the same as my current phone... And I was photo editor of our high school yearbook and newspaper and really had enjoyed it, so she splurged into a digital SLR. Anyways, camera cord was lost (see below) and a replacement was just bought on eBay (£10, rather than £40 direct from Sony). Here's some pics to make up for lost time:

Bath: Jamie surprised me with a trip to Bath for Valentines Day. The train to Bath leaves from Paddington Station, so we took this pic and then had Krispy Kremes :) You can see the green draping which is part of the store in the background.

In Bath back in the day they had a window tax so they bricked up windows and made their houses look dumb:

Speaking of looking dumb, red tour bus headphones are sweet....This is us on the second day in front of the Abbey after a morning at the Bath Thermal Spas. No pics, but it was cool.

Moving on...The day after we got home from Bath we left for Spain!

This is the awesome place we found in this tiny little town called Tres Cales, about an hour south of Barcelona:

We did a bunch of lounging around as Zach is demonstrating here:
We didn't even make it to Barcelona; this was a proper holiday of doing as little as possible. We did visit this town called Tortosa which is near the mouth of the river Ebro, which is a huge important river in Northern Spain and many many miles upstream is also the river which the Rioja wine region lies on (a tributary river called the Oja is where the name comes from- rio oja = rioja)

We did make it to this cool castle which had been converted into a fort/artillery position during probably WWI or WWII. Here we are as a family looking through one of the old gun turrets
We also had a chance to visit Priorat, a tiny wine region with vines on steep slopes which make awesome grenache wines on par with the best Chateneuf de Papes. And equally as expensive. This is from one of the more industrial producers in Priorat, most are smaller operations, but all make some pretty awesome wine.

After this trip we got home and Brad started his job with Whole Foods which has been amazing ever since. I'll post some more pics of our Eater holiday next time. Maybe one day I'll catch up with current times...

Cheers!

Easter Hols in the States

2009-04-13T16:58:00.003+01:00

The very English way of saying vacation is Holiday, so all the cool kids just say "hols." Ours has been fantastic. We hit the ground running, flying into LAX and heading directly to Disneyland with Brad's parents, aka Grammy and Grampy. We scaled back to only two days of the Magic Kingdom, after Aidan passed out at 9am on day 3 of our trip Disneyland Paris last May. But at nearly a year older than the last trip Aidan was having way more fun, and we ended up bumping our tickets up to 3 day passes.

One crazy random thing that happened is running into a guy I knew from working at a church in the San Jose area back in college. It had seriously been like 9 years since I had seen him and Jamie actually recognized him first. So we had a chance to catch up in the line to the new Finding Nemo submarine ride before we parted ways. It was one of those cool moments, where it's like "Hey see you in eternity if I don't see you before," type moments with other believers that you just don't have time/geographic proximity to hang out with more. I often think of all the people I'll get to see again in heaven and how cool it will be to have the time (if it exists there) to hang out with more people. But I digress...

Aidan is an all star at Disneyland! Big Thunder Mountain? No problem. Matterhorn? He liked the "polar bear" (yeti) that was going to eat us on Disneyland Mountain. Splash Mountain? He loved getting wet. And he did the kiddie rides too with just as much enjoyment. By day three he was ready to do the Monster ride, disneyland mountain and the train all again. As we finally got in the car to head back to Kingsburg Aidan was chatting about all his adventures. After a brief pause, my mom turned around to ask him a question and he was passed out in the carseat. Disneyland: Done.

Equally as awesome was our time at my parent's homestead in Central California, outside of Kingsburg, home of Sun Maid raisins. My dad has constant puttering projects to do outside and Aidan became his little helper the whole time. So Aidan got to drive the tractor, mow the lawn, pick up tools, take the rubbish bins to the end of the driveway and even got to take a trip to the hardware store. After about day 3 of being at home, Aidan says, "Grampy, you're like Bob the Builder," which my dad took as the highest compliment he could receive.

After some awesome time at the Forbes' homestead we headed up to the PNW and spent Saturday/Easter Sunday with Jamie's best friend from high school, Krista and her brood. It is always fun to hang out with them because they are just really cool people and enjoy a nice bottle of wine as well. And Jamie's parents drove over from Pulman and spent Easter with us as well. It was a good time for Aidan to hang out with some other kids after spending a week being indulged by grandparents. One odd thing that happened was when we arrived I heading in for a nap after waking up at 5am to make our flight to Seattle. When I woke up, my eye was all gunky and sure enough I had pink eye. Gross and random. But fortunately, just as random, Krista's dad is an optometrist so Kirsta just called him up and I spoke with him long enough for him to call in a prescription to a local Walgreens for eye meds. Awesomely convenient.

Despite the sickness, time with the Schei's was awesome. Easter was wild, as their church put on rock and roll church for Easter, for better or worse. It was a bit overwhelming and I realized how out of touch I was as they opened the service with the new U2 song which I had no clue was a U2 song. It was certainly rocking with a standard gospel presentation as the sermon. Coolest part was seeing people getting baptized on Easter sunday and they had like 60 people getting dunked. It always reminds me of this one description of baptism from the 3rd or 4th century about how intense their baptism service was: Baptism only on Easter, All night prayer vigil, excorcism, and naked dunking, so seperate guy/girl baptisms. Crazy intense, but certainly an unforgettable experience in one's spiritual life.

After the weekend with the Scheis we rounded out our time with the 'hood. It was just a great time to spend with friends that we haven't seen, spend some time experiencing home stuff, and getting some personal business taken care of; i.e. Dentist, doctor, optometrist stuff. Oli went to the doctor and continued progressing along his waifish weight. The doctor gave the pretty funny comment of, "Well...he's on the chart now!" And fortunately he is super healthy all around even as a svelt looking little toddler. Dentist visits were awesome for everyone but Jamie, who amazingly got her first cavity at age 30! Impressive or annoying, depending how you look at it.

Most fun was having a little get together BBQ to celebrate Jamie's 30th birthday and the chance to catch a Mariners game with the boys which was preceded by Happy Hour at the Melting Pot with my wife! It was so great to see Aidan getting the opportunity to play with everyone in the hood and we look forward to the day we move back! But not today... :)

Cheers!

P.S. So we would be remiss if we didn't have a Mack and Jacks before we left. We never got the opportunity during the week, so we ended up having pints at the Africa Lounge, the Mack and Jack's dedicated bar, at Sea Tac. It was a great way to finish of a vacation from which we needed a vacation :)

P.P.S. Sorry still no pictures, I hope you enjoy text!

Stupid Camera Cord!

2009-03-26T00:23:00.002Z

Apologies for the lack of blogging in recent weeks. It's really just laziness on my part but I've been using the excuse that I can't find the camera's usb cable to download pictures. Which is part of the story as well. Here's the past 6+ weeks in a nutshell: For Valentine's Jamie surprised me with a quick trip to Bath, about 2 hours west of London. Really cool, touristy place where we had a really fun time just wandering around the old-timey/ornate area surrounding the Natural Baths and Abbey. We only went for the weekend and here is where I would insert pictures of all the cool old timey buldings and the baths etc. However I have no camera cable.

For this trip and the ensuing trip to Spain Jamie bought me/us a new awesome camera. However sometime in the past 6 weeks I've already misplaced it. Grr!

So on to the aforementioned Spain trip. We felt the need to get out of the UK and booked a trip to Spain to a place south of Barcelona by an hour or so. It was pretty cold still, but sunny and that made all the difference! And so did getting a new job. I had walked into Whole Foods Market in London and spoke with the Wine department about a position recently posted. After speaking with the team leader and assistant store manager the said they'd get back to. That happened in almost perfect timing after jsut arriving in Spain. We had got out of the airport and were heading down to our house, about 45 minutes from the airport. After being in the car for 20 minutes or so Aidan says he has to go wee and we stop at a rest stop, I hop out with him, and as we come back to the car my mobile phone starts to ring with a job offer. That was a pretty awesome way to start the vacation. After of week of doing nothing we headed back and I got to start at Whole Foods.

I am still just starting but eventually it looks as if I'll get the opportunity to make some buying decisions, along with the basics of stocking shelves, helping customers, etc. The people I work with are awesome, company is great and one that values having a work/home balance. So I'll be there for awhile I'm sure.

Sadly, Zach's time with us is quickly drawing to a close. He is out of here on Friday, which is crazy! It seems like he's just gotten here, but I guess it has been half a year. Fortunately he also found his own replacement too. A girl named Beth will be nannying for us starting Friday. She is an awesome girl that Zach knows from church here. We met with her last weekend and are excited at how awesome she is.

And a week from Friday we will be taking another vacation, this time back to the US! We will be heading to D-land the first week with my parents and then will be in Tacoma for the second week, along with spending Easter weekend with Jamie's BFF from high school and her husband, the Schei's. I'm praying for awesome weather, at least in LA. And with the new job, I'll get to visit some producers while home!

I just hope I can either find our camera cord or get a new one before we leave...

Cheers!

Happy Mothering Sunday

2009-03-22T10:19:00.003Z

For some reason, the English celebrate Mother's Day in March, but it's not really called Mother's Day - they say Happy Mummy's Day or Happy Mothering Sunday (that's the posh way).

It's great for Americans like me who get to celebrate two mother's days! :-) To kick it off, Aidan came home from school on Friday with his card with a flower and a picture of him on the front and that inside said "To Mummy, Thank you for making pancakes and coffee cake. Love, Aidan xxx" and then he signed it himself! So cute...

Then last night at about 2:30 AM, Aidan came into our room wanting to sleep in our bed. He doesn't do that very often, but usually we tell him no and carry him back to his room. Last night though he got really upset when I said that, and I was too tired to care, so I let him stay telling him he had to be quiet and go to sleep. Then he tells me he has a tummy ache and he wants some warm milk. That his one of his classic stall tactics, but usually it does get him chilled out and he goes to sleep, so I was willing to indulge him if it meant I could get back to sleep. After he drank his warm milk, we both settled in to fall back asleep when suddenly Aidan starts puking all over himself, my arm, my pillow, sheets, and blankets! After that, he went on to puke again in new jammies and his own bed and then later in to a plastic bowl a few times. 2 hours, two sheets changes, pajama changes (for everyone) and laundry loads later - he fell asleep on my lap in his bed and I drifted off sitting up. He's only ever had one puking episode and it was after eating some dodgy airplane food over a year ago but this was officially our first ever "up with my kid puking half the night" - awesome. Happy Mother's Day.

I had decided we weren't going to make it to church this morning after that night, so I was hoping to redeem a shred of my mother's day pampering by a good sleep-in (or lie-in, as they say). However, as if he forgot the whole thing, I was awoken by him at 8 AM ready to face his day. I'm convinced it must have been a bout of food poisoning then (he was at a birthday party yesterday where they made their own pizzas and had a "swimming pool" cake with weird blue gel "frosting" because he's been in fine form all day, but it sure will be a mother's day I'm not soon going to forget!

Brad did cook me a lovely Italian style omelette this morning and he was gracious enough to get up with Oliver this morning at 7, so it definitely has some redeeming points. I'm off to go catch up on my sleep now...
Jamie

Snow, glorious snow!

2009-02-09T11:01:00.010Z

We got totally dumped on last Sunday night/Monday morning! It was a great day, as our tube line is mostly outside, it was shut down, all buses were shut down and pretty much the entire population of London had a snow day.

Aidan was very excited to both get to sleep in and to wake up to mom home making snowman pancakes. He decorated it himself with raisins and dried cranberries. Poor kid doesn't even realize that if he pushed us we would have let him use candy instead of dried fruit :)

It was amazing to see all the people out heading to the park in snow kit with sleds(sledges here) in hand. After admiring the snow in our back garden, Aidan and I put on our snow clothes and went to play in the front. Now, notice in the picture below that Aidan has instinctively created a snow angel. We've read the classic kid's book, The Snowy Day, a few times but it was hilarious to see how naturally he realized that fresh snow is made to roll around in.

Aidan was also ready for a good snowball fight. For about a year or so Jamie has played pretend snowball fight with Aidan. I'm not really sure how it came about, but it became one of his favorite things to pretend to gather up snow and then throw it, though he looked more like Ryu throwing his blue fire balls.

Despite all of Aidan's pretend snowball making, he had to have me make most of them. I threw a few at him, which he thought was pretty fun. I can't wait until he's old enough to really pelt him! Ultimately, he was more excited about me putting the biggest piece of snow he could carry in his arms and then eating it.

We ended the day by making one of the worst snowmen ever. Jamie and Zach were both giving me a hard time for my pathetic snowman making skills. In my defense, I did grow up in Central California and saw snow about 4 times in my life before moving to Washington.

Best snow story I heard: my co-small group leader stood out on his balcony at 9:00am on Monday morning and just chucked snowballs at people walking to work. Half threw them back and half were really pissed. Oh, and he's 25. Never grow up people, never grow up :)

Cheers!

2009-02-04T13:20:00.005Z

Yes, this is a picture of Aidan punching Oliver in the face and Oliver is laughing all the while. I'm sure many of you are feeling like punching us in the face since we haven't blogged in a great long while. I've finally had it with the Microsoft pages, as there seems to be some sort of coding war going on and it is incredibly difficult to use with our Mac. Maybe it is just incredibly difficult to use a Mac, or to use Microsoft pages, or I'm just a difficult person in general. I'm not really sure...

Either way, welcome to our new and improved blog!

2009 had a very fun start to it, with Oliver's first birthday!

Here he is enjoying his one-year old Tiramisu, which has become the traditional 1 year old birthday cake in our household. If two first birthdays counts as tradition. Actually we ended up having three; Oliver got a preemptive birthday party so that all the Hopkins clan could celebrate with him. He then had the second part of Tiramisu on his actually birthday, January 2nd. Shortly after that, he started to walk, like this:

He is all over the place now. He's even started to dance! Check this out (Over-proud parent warning: this could be a tedious 2 minutes to those not related or interested in babies dancing to OkGo dancing on treadmills; feel free to skip it)-

Other than that, January was a bit dreary. February, however started out with snow! I'll write more later.

Cheers!