4 Days in London

I have often dreamed of visiting the United Kingdom with Ben, but I honestly never thought it would happen in this decade. Somehow, the stars aligned this spring, and it just seemed like the perfect time for us to take such a wonderfully indulgent trip. So, we closed our eyes, opened our wallets, and went for it!

First item of business, visit London. Show Ben all of the things I fell in love with during my semester abroad in 2002.

Here I am at the BYU London Center: 27 Palace Court. 8 years older, and wiser too.

The Orangerie at Kensington Gardens (my old jogging territory)

Kensington Palace

Royal Albert Hall

Serpentine River, dividing Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park

Buckingham Palace

We randomly happened to be on Birdcage Walk when people started gathering along the sides of the road. Soon we heard drums, and then this procession of important looking British people happened. Not sure what it was all about (parade commemorating new guards?), but it seemed like the quintessential London moment!

Big Ben and Little Ben (he lost 15 lbs. before leaving on this trip!)

The Houses of Parliament

Westminster Abbey. We did the audio tour here and loved it. SO much history has happened and been commemorated in this one building.

We didn't get a picture, but after Westminster Abbey we went to the Imperial War Rooms and Churchill Museum, which was incredible. Seeing the bunker from which Churchill directed the UK's forces in WWII really made the war seem so real to us.

And just one more Big Ben picture (we took about 10 throughout the trip)

This phone booth was just begging us to use it for a photo op.

Ben at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Here's what I love: Trafalgar Square minus the pigeons (thanks to a recent city ordinance not to feed them); a whirlwind trip through the National Gallery to see only the best paintings (not my favorite way, but we had lots to see); the fact that all of the London museums and galleries are FREE to the public.

Classic photo of Big Ben on the Thames, taken by Ben. Yes, I know that "Big Ben" actually refers to the bell within the tower, not actually the clock tower. I'm counting on you using your X-ray goggles to see the bell. :)

View of Tower Bridge from our river cruise on the way to Greenwich.

Ben straddling the Prime Meridian in Greenwich. I remembered thinking of Ben the entire time I was at Greenwich (just a little side area of London) 8 years ago. I just kept thinking that this was a place he would be fascinated with and would love to see. And was I right? Yes. We both loved it. It is the home of the Royal Observatory where the problem of determining one's longitude while at sea was first tackled. They have a great (free!) museum about how the problem was actually solved in two different ways--once by using complicated star maps (made at the Observatory) and another by using extremely accurate time pieces, which are on display there. Very cool.

The red ball on the top of the Royal Observatory drops daily at 1:00, a sign by which sailors have set their clocks for centuries.

Tower of London. We did the classic Beefeater tour and loved it.

London Bridge. I just had to take a picture because it's not a very fancy bridge for all the hype it gets. Why don't we sing about Tower Bridge falling down?

Millennium Bridge, on the other hand, is pretty spectacular. Don't worry -- we watched out for dementors as we walked across on our way to the Globe.

We saw Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. It was pretty gruesome and a bit disturbing, but we enjoy it (you all know how Ben likes his bloodshed). Notice the black sheet coming out from the stage. I think this is something new they did specifically for this play. The groundlings in the standing room only section had to stand under this sheet, poking their heads up through little holes. It was so funny to see their heads popping out! Then they had larger slits in the sheet, and throughout the play scary things (like bloody bodies) would pop up out of these slits and reach for the groundlings' heads. There were also lots of bloody bodies popping up out of trap doors in the stage. Yeah . . . so . . . I guess they have to come up with something different to do after showing Shakespeare plays in the same theatre for several hundreds of years.

We would like to thank the Stephensons, our good friends from NJ, for making our trip to London possible. They now live in London, and they opened their house to us (Emma gave up her suite on the top floor for us) and let us stay. We had a great time getting to see them again! On Wednesday we spent the morning going to their neighborhood park, which happens to be this really amazing park that is used as a setting for period films and such. Above are the 4 Stephenson kids heading to the park.

And here we are at Chiswick House, built during the reign of George II as a summer home for some important guy (Lord Burlington?). We took a tour of the house with the kids and enjoyed Magnum bars while the kids played a bit in the park. It was the perfect end to our stay in London.

Now . . . stay tuned for York, Scotland, and a random 1-hour visit to Amsterdam!

Idea Man

Somewhere along the way, our little car-obsessed boy shifted gears. He used to spend the entire day planning out, mapping out, and then laying out new adventures for his cars. He still enjoys cars, talks about them, and definitely plays with them a little every day. But his new obsession is IDEAS! I can't think of a better way to explain it. He wakes up in the morning with an elaborate mission in mind: "Mom, today, let's have a transportation party! We'll invite all my friends, and first, we'll do transportation puzzles; then everyone can pretend to be whatever vehicle they want to be; then we'll watch Mighty Machines; then everyone can build cars or trucks out of Tinkertoys; and for dessert, we'll make a cake that looks like a digger!"

This is a great idea. There are only three problems with it: 1) He has no concept of how long it will actually take to carry out his idea, nor of the chance that we might already have plans for the day; 2) He is ready to go forward with it NOW, and I haven't even eaten breakfast yet; 3) Come 20 minutes, he'll be raring to go with another super duper schmooper big idea.

I would estimate that Henry comes up with at least 10 huge ideas per day. On an average day, he may be lucky enough to convince Mom to follow through with 1-2 of them (usually the ones that sound easiest win me over). Of those 1-2 ideas per day (let's call it 45 per month), only a few make it to publication on the blog. So now you know. We're swimming in ideas. Here are a few we happened to have the camera out for:

"Luggage Train" (we set up furniture like a train and then load everything on it)

"Paper Town." This one took days to convince me. When Henry saw this paper I bought with the houses on it, he just had to use it for something. He drew the roads and parking spaces and helped to glue everything together.

"Henry's Crown." He made this pretty much all by himself. I was so proud of his crown-drawing skills! He decided to make it for any siblings of his Joy School classmates who might feel bad that they didn't get a ticket for our pretend movie theater.

You may notice in the background some giant drawings, an ocean collage, etc. Most of Henry's recent ideas have been craft projects. "I just LOVE doing crafts!" he tells me nearly every day. I have decided to devote an entire wall to the projects, since our bulletin board was getting crowded :)

Below you will find today's idea: a movie entitled "Henry and the Purple Crayon."

Henry and the Purple Crayon from Ben and Jenn on Vimeo.

And if you are still reading, here are a few other ideas we have carried out, but haven't taken pictures of:

* a pirate/treasure party (with the babysitting co-op)

* "Train Builder" game

* "Sea Divers," a favorite game in which we all run around the house carrying bags that might scoop up random objects from the bottom of the ocean

And a few ideas he has insisted on several times, but we have yet to carry out because I don't quite grasp the vision:

* Make a Hawaiian Haystack just for a decoration

* Make our own website game where people can make their own family, choosing from different people with different colors of skin and different kinds of clothes.