This weekend

This may come as no surprise, but I think a weekend free of all house-hunting duties was really a good thing for me. Yesterday, Eric spent an hour or two poring over the details of the new batch of listings that the relocation company sent us, but other than glancing at those with him, I really tried to steer my mind away from the topic.

Saturday we slept in a bit, then had breakfast and played with Brooks around the flat. Since our shipment of stuff from home will be sitting on a dock for a while, as we wait to move into our new flat, we decided that we needed to procure a few more diversions for the little guy. We went up to Piccadilly Circus and then strolled down Regent Street to Hamley's, the UK's largest toy store. Whoa! A whirling, flashing, ringing, squealing, brightly colored mob scene attacked our senses as we attempted to find pre-school appropriate toys within the seven story mass chaos of this store. We were in there less than 10 seconds before one of us said calmly to the other "Please, kill me now..." However we found a great playmat area to test out items before buying them (we discovered that we're not ready for the piano) and bought a couple of toys for Brooks - a set of painted wooden nesting boxes that he has all kinds of fun pounding into each other and a "touch and crawl friend" - an little electronic thing that rolls away from you when you touch it. Should be fun to watch Brooks figure it out as he attempts to perfect his crawl.



Playing with Daddy at Hamleys...


Woah! I can make LOTS of noise with THIS thing!

That evening we wandered around between the Regent street and Soho areas, trying to find a child-friendly pub where we could eat and watch one of the two big sporting events on...(nope, not the Indians or Auburn)... The English Football Team was playing Israel in a big soccer match. Also the Rugby World Cup is happening right now in the UK and England was playing the USA team. We searched in vain... all the pubs were either over-21 only (why don't they post a sign stating this, rather than making us guess?), or didn't have a TV, or were completely packed to standing room only with enthusiastic fans. By the time we finally gave up, I was starving so we stopped at a burger diner place, and we inhaled supper before wandering back to Piccadilly to Waterstone's (an enormous bookstore) to browse for some books for Brooks (again all our childrens' books are in a container on the boat!)

Sunday we slept in and then went back to HTB for the 11am service. After that we went in search of a "full English Breakfast" - an UK standard meal, typically bacon and/or sausage, baked beans, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, fried eggs and toast with coffee or tea. We found it and I never wanted to eat again - completely stuffed. That afternoon we played with Brooks, snoozed a bit, I read some of Harry Potter 6 while Eric looked at property listings online and then we did quite a bit of planning for our time in Italy this fall with my family. I'm really excited about the upcoming Italy trip. Sissy and I'll be showing Eric, Brooks and my parents many of the places we visited when we were there six years ago. Later, Eric found our dinner at the grocery, exactly what he wanted and half price as well, so we had a little victory party over supper. It definitely feels like we're slowly figuring out our way around this (very pricey) neighborhood.


Eskimo-kissing with Mommy...


Sunset from our bedroom window...

Today I'm off to look at another property that has some potential... please continue to pray for us and our housing search. I look forward to reporting good news on that front very soon!