Our Days in the UK

We moved to our new house last October, so it's not really so new. But we've been exploring the new set of footpaths that surround us here (we're just a few villages down from Naunton, still in the beautiful Cotswolds). Our favorite path winds past the old railway embankment, crosses the tracks, and leads to the neighboring village. It also crosses the stream (which here is technically a river) twice and we've spotted lots of fish and crawdads. Justin also dropped a shoe in the river once, but that's another story. Fortunately, it was a buoyant Croc so we rescued it with a long stick... Anyway, here's (one of) our new favorite places to walk in our village. That bridge you see up above is the best crawdad-spotting place on the walk. We saw a bunch and looked up the species. It turns out that the native crawdads are being crowded out by an invasive species from America, and that's the species we saw in our local stream. Hopefully the locals don&#

And in our quick march through the past five months, we move from New Year's Day to mid-February...We didn't get anywhere near the snow we got last winter, but in February we did have a solid snowfall that was play-in-able. The neighborhood kids got a snow day off school so my kids joined them to build a snowman in the front yard and the green across from us in our cul-de-sac. Justin and Rebecca also set up a snow cone factory in our backyard using fruit juice and snow. Everyone (except Eric) misses the proper snows of a good New England winter, but we feel grateful that we've had at least some snow in both of the winters we've been here so far. The summer that followed last winter's exceptional snowfall was also exceptional in its hotness and dryness, so we'll see what this summer brings. This spring we've had only a handful of warm days, but we've definitely had quite a few sunny days. It's so nice because during the winter it feels li

Do you remember this breakfast above from my very first post? Well, to mark our one year anniversary in the UK we went to the very same pub we went to for our very first breakfast on New Year's Day. This time we weren't jet-lagged.  The kids want to make it a tradition, so maybe I'll post the same breakfast picture (on the same plate, no less) every year. The pub was still all decked out for Christmas, so excuse the seasonally-inappropriate-by-now decor in the background. I haven't downloaded pictures from my phone since, oh, last December, so we will reminisce together as I catch up. But my main reason for posting these pictures is that on New Year's Day, shortly after our anniversary breakfast, we also discovered that we will be welcoming a new person to our family in early September! Here are some answers to FAQs: 1) We are all very excited. 2) I am now almost through the second trimester and have been feeling really good. I anticipate exhaustio