Happy New Year!

Happy new year to all, and happy birthday to K.J.  I'm so glad he's my partner in life.

We had a great afternoon and night out on the last day of the year going to our first escape room, eating dinner at Chick-fil-A, and seeing Star Wars.  2019 was a really wonderful year for us.  I used the One Second Everyday app most days of the year, and it was so fun to put all the months together this morning and watch our year go by in little blips of extraordinary and ordinary moments.

We had snow days in January.

In February, I attended a Thrive Retreat in Italy for women working overseas with friends.

In March we visited Normandy and Brittany, and I photographed a wedding in the Netherlands.

There were cherry blossoms in April as well as a visit from my parents.

I had an amazing Mother's Day outing in May and hosted our literary society on V-E Day at our house.

In June we had cherries and a fox that visited several times to eat the ones that fell to the ground.  

The kids had so much fun with cousins in July, and we spent our first 4th of July in the U.S. in five years.  We watched the jets fly over Paris on Bastille Day, K.J. biked through Switzerland, and we all survived a record-breaking heatwave.

August brought new friends to Paris to serve alongside us at EIC Ternes.  The kids started back to school, and we enjoyed the quieter days of summer in Paris.  We ate a lot of dinners in the garden with Noreen.

In September our firstborn became a teenager, and we took a family vacation across the channel when all the rates went down, a big advantage to homeschooling.  I got the flu, and we started a regular Sunday School for the kids at church.

October began with celebrating a decade of James, and we attended the International Baptist Convention in Naples, which we were able to combine with visiting fellow church-planters in Rome.  We made it back in time to enjoy beautiful autumn colors around Paris.

November was often gray, but there were beautifully-colored leaves, Remembrance Day celebrations that took us to the British Embassy, and Thanksgiving meals with church family and friends.

And of course December has been a month for time with family and celebrating the birth of Christ.  A friend asked me last night what the highlights of time in Alabama have been, and the answers were surprisingly simple:  family, Target, Chick-fil-A, speaking English.  

I love looking back, but I'm also excited about the year ahead.

Walking on the White Cliffs

For an entire year I happily reminisce about how wonderful our England vacation was, and I'm so glad to be going back again this September.  I pack really light this year, and K.J. is impressed.  I tell him I purposely left lots of room for all the books I'll be bringing back.  He stops looking impressed and looks a little nervous.

My heart is light even when we miss our boat because our passports need extra attention.  The border guards are thankfully kind and understanding, and we're put on the next boat where English immediately and familiarly surrounds us.  The language changes, and the cuisine changes.  I eat an early dinner of Pumpkin Ravioli.

It's Ella's 13th birthday, and K.J. and I think a walk along the cliffs, hearing the white gulls call, while the wind whips through her hair, is a perfect gift for our girl.  She loves that kind of thing.

I immediately spot a rabbit off the path.  We must be back in England.  

I love the juxtaposition of the autumn grass and the turquoise sea and how the cliffs meet the water.  I don't love how the wind whips little hairs into my eyes, obscuring my vision, so I wear my hat.

I love blackberry season in England.  I love seeing the flower, the ripe and unripe fruit all together.

I follow the kids down a hill, which then means I have to follow them up a steep path, and my knee of the two meniscus repairs screams at me for attempting such a thing.

At the top of the hill we sit and eat slices of the cookie cake I made for E.  It's a beautiful spot to celebrate her life.

"You must remember that this 

was in the old Merry England…

when the forests rang with knights 

walloping each other on the helm, 

and the unicorns in the wintry moonlight 

stamped with their silver feet 

and snorted their noble breaths of blue 

upon the frozen air.  Such marvels were great 

and comfortable ones.  

But in the Old England there was 

a greater marvel still.  

The weather behaved itself.”

- The Once and Future King, T.H. White -

A Birthday

I've heard other women say that their thirties were a really good decade of finally feeling comfortable in their own skin, knowing who they were and what they liked and feeling confident in those things.  I can relate to that, though for me, moving to another country and adapting to a new culture in my early thirties has shaped me in a lot of new ways.  Most of all, I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M IN MY MID-THIRTIES NOW.  

But here I am, and I thought 35 should be something I celebrated instead of dreaded.  The cultural stereotype of women stopping the age count at 29 seems really silly when hopefully, Lord willing, I have 50+ good years left to enjoy.  So here I am 35, and here are some of the things I know I love and got to fill my birthday weekend with.

The Yorkshire Dales

If you could mail-order a perfect winter's day for a birthday outing, you would have been given this one.  

Cross-Cultural Experiences

Of course there are times I miss being where everything feels "normal," (thus my choice of restaurants for my birthday weekend) but without living here, how could I know how weird the English find the American habit of eating sweet and savory things together?  Bacon dipped in maple syrup, sweet potato casserole as a side, congealed salad eaten with a main dish:  These things blow their minds every time.  As an aside, I don't know if I've ever even heard an American use the word savory.

The Comfort of Familiarity

My first year away from home at college, the simple act of putting an Andy Griffith tape into the VCR was like a security blanket in a new world.  A 1950's-style American diner in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales has a similar effect now, as well as the best hamburgers in the world, crushed ice, and free refills at Five Guys.

Sun Flare

I can't stop loving it.

Bookstores, Old and New

Buying Second-Hand Books

It started early buying old copies of Nancy Drew mysteries for 50 cents.

Being with these Three

Friends

I especially appreciate quick-thinking friends who strip your child's wet clothes off and give her their extra sweater before my brain has time to even process that my 10-year-old just fell in the river fully-clothed in January.

I took a screenshot of this picture shared by Sally Lloyd Jones on my birthday.  It felt like a good thought at the beginning of a new year of life.

Fountains Abbey with BP and Debbo

In the slow moments I want to take the time to go through pictures of the two weeks we had with my parents.  

On New Year's Eve we drove over for a walk around Fountains Abbey, and in the hopes of seeing some of the deer we went in the back entrance.  We've never started from the back before with guests so my parents first sight of the abbey was from the "Surprise View" up at the top of a hill, which is of course, the best view in our opinion.

We were really pleased to spot some of the herd while walking near the woods.  This was as far as my telephoto lens would reach, but my dad was able to get closer.  We had so few sunny moments over the Christmas holidays that I was surprised the deer were choosing the shade.

Ella and James made the grandparents close their eyes and led them by the hand when we arrived at the surprise view.  It really is worth the anticipation.

I snapped the above picture in a hurry when the birds rose up together to fly to another perch.  I love it when they do that.

The day before we had visited the World of James Herriot in Thirsk, and James insisted he needed this little notepad with cows on the front where he could write notes about different animals he saw. True to his intent he carried this notebook around drawing pictures and writing notes about dogs, pheasants, deer, etc.  It was pretty cute.

See?  I wasn't lying about the copious note-taking.  He was so diligent in his purpose that KJ relented from making him pay for the notepad with his own money.  He decided it was 2 pounds well spent.

It's about a 5 mile loop when you walk the whole thing.  My toes were cold by the end.  We did a quick drive-through the Ripon McDonalds for lunch and coffee, dropped everyone off at home, and then KJ and I drove quickly back to Ripon where we made it just in time for the 2:30 showing of Star Wars.  And by just in time we walked into a pitch black theater, having no idea whether we were at the front or the back during that small space before the:  STAR WARS!!  That's always the most thrilling part, isn't it?