September 2016

September was a crazy month of moving into our rental house and trying to get settled before the kids started school. Our furniture didn't arrive until late September so we were sleeping on mattress pads for about a month. Fortunately our landlord left us a table and chairs so we had a place to eat. We were basically camping in our house for our first month!

Part of September was searching for furniture to fit in our rental house. Houses here have very little closets - our house had a closet in the master bedroom but not in any of the other bedrooms. And when our furniture finally arrived some of it didn't fit up our narrow staircase!

We started our furniture search for desks at John Lewis, our favorite department store in London. We also found time to walk down by the Thames for some pictures!

Sphinx at the base of Cleopatra's Needle

Thames River and Big Ben in the background

The school uniforms are much more formal here - skirt for Rachel and tie for Carson every day. And blazers too! And even a hat for Rachel. Wow, don't they look 'brilliant'!

Since I was terrified to drive on the left side of the road, we lived our first month of school without a car. We sure got in great shape walking back and forth to school each day (about a mile each way). With the nice weather it wasn't so bad. By the end of September I took some driving lessons and we finally bought a car. Its a Nissan Qashqai, a family car by UK standards but it would be considered tiny in the US. Its nice to have transportation to get around! Here we are taking scooters to school, hoping it would be faster then walking but not really.

The kids school pictures came out great!

Our rental house has a jungle gym outside including swings, a slide, a climbing wall and a picnic table next to the swings. We had some warm days before school started and a few evenings we took our dinner out to the picnic table. We discovered that as soon as the sun goes down the mosquitos come out! We felt very lucky to have such a warm summer, several Brits have told me this was the warmest summer they can remember for years.

 A park nearby with fun things to climb on.