Our Days in the UK

We celebrated Good Friday this morning at our village church. It was a family event, so there were crafts and an Easter garden followed by a short family service and at the end an egg hunt. Our village church shares a rector with several others, so people came from our village of Naunton as well as the neighboring villages. We met lots of new people, all of whom were very friendly and welcoming, and we ate our first ever hot cross buns! First we all gathered in the church and the kids enjoyed various crafts and hot cross buns while the adults supervised (and also enjoyed hot cross buns). I volunteered to help with a craft so I brought the supplies we had leftover from our Valentine's craft and the kids painted salt dough candle holders (this time in Easter shapes.) I didn't take a photo of the table we set up in the church because they proved very popular so I was kept busy manning the table. But here's a photo of the ones my kids painted (and one by my mom.) Other

We are gearing up for Easter here despite colder-than-usual temperatures and later-than-usual blooms. We have started to see a few spring bulbs popping up, and the snowdrops have been blooming for a few weeks now. I didn't get a picture of snowdrops, but here are some primroses, some unknown purple flowers, and a brave daffodil all blooming on the side of our main village road. Despite these glimpses of spring, most of the trees still look like this: And so, to bring a little spring inside, and to get ready for Easter, we got inspired by this post to do a flower-nature-Easter study. We bought some in-bloomed lilies from Aldi and chose one to draw every day until it had fully bloomed. The first day we paired it with one of our favorite get-ready-for-Easter books, The Parable of the Lily . After we read it, we started to draw. Our first day drawings looked like this: It took ten days for both flowers to bloom, and the kids whined a few times about d

I cook a lot around here, and in order to avoid going crazy I always try to simplify our menus and meal plans. But my kids don't like eating the same thing day after day, and neither do I, to be honest. To meet the dual needs of simplicity and variety I have a weekly breakfast menu that I stick to every week. Mondays are oatmeal day. I like oatmeal, my kids tolerate it. I like to start the week with an easy meal that I can have ready the night before (I soak the oats overnight with a little wheat flour and whey to maximize their nutrition and digestibility, since I know you were dying to know why I prepare them the night before...) It makes me feel like I can handle Monday, to know our breakfast is ready when we wake up (well, I have to turn the stove on to actually cook the oats, but I can handle that much even on a Monday!) Anyway, the one thing about oats is that it's always hard to determine exactly how much to make with my two kids. Sometimes they eat, like, fo

The Village Coffee Shop is not actually a coffee shop. It is more like a coffee hour, held at the village church every Thursday morning. The kids and I have gone twice and it is a lovely time to meet and chat with other villagers and to enjoy the beautiful church. Most attendees are older and retired so they are always good to the kids. The kids like it because they always get a biscuit ( which you will remember is actually a cookie.. .) I like it because I can learn about the village and area from people who know better than I do what is going on!

Any guesses what this word of the day means in the UK? I'll give you a hint. These are not American-style refrigerators: Any guesses now? Yes, American=big . Except when it means American, of course. I mean, when people ask if we're American, I don't think it's because we're big, I think it's because we talk funny (although at least a few of us are, in fact, also quite big...)  But if you're referring to an appliance, a car, or a drink, we've discovered that the descriptive term "American" or "American-style" usually means it's much bigger than the normal British equivalent. This should give all of us Americans reason to pause, I think. Sometimes we probably don't need the sizes we've become accustomed to. We could probably almost always survive with smaller-sized soft drinks. I suspect many of us could manage with smaller cars. The refrigerators are maybe a different story. We got a big, American-style ch

I think we accidentally packed some New England winter in our suitcases and brought it with us. We have had three big batches of snow since moving here, and usually they only rarely get a dusting during the winter... The most recent storm, Beast from the East Part 2, snowed us in from Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening. The thing about it is, they don't actually get a huge amount of snow, but it's so unusual here no one is equipped for it. In this case we got about four inches. The county workers put grit on all the roads, which probably works great for an inch or so, but doesn't do much when you get anything more. No plows run on any of the county roads. I think they might plow the major roads from time to time because when we drove into Oxford it looked like maybe a path had been plowed, but that's it. Last time it snowed we went out driving after it started to melt and the roads were crazy. In most places, busy two way roads were one narrow lane for l

A little late, I know, but I don't write on the weekends so I'm playing catch-up. St. Patrick's Day first, unbelievable spring snowstorm next... Even though we're closer to the place it all began, St. Patrick's Day was celebrated much less here than back in Boston. Thanks to Boston's large number of Irish immigrants there is a rich St. Patrick's Day tradition there. You often see green on passersby, bakeries make holiday cookies, there is a parade, etc. Here, I think we were the only people I saw wearing green, and I didn't see a single St. Patrick's Day thing in any of our stores. My friend told me that in some of the cities with larger Irish immigrant populations here there are more celebrations, but in our neck of the woods, it was pretty quiet. But fear not, in honor of the one-fourth of me that's Irish, we celebrated in style! We had green smoothies, eggs with spinach, and shamrock-shaped homemade Pop Tarts (the kids remembered them