Our Favorite Things...

On our last Sunday we had a little tea with cakes to say good-bye to friends from church and then afterwards Kristin and the kids came over with pizza, so we could say good-bye one last time. I thought these photos of Jillian and Eli sharing her only bike (that was left) were precious.


I also took pictures of Faith in her cot/ crib. I am so happy that I was able to give my "beloved cot" (it was one material thing I was super sad to leave behind) to Kristin for her to use for their new baby boy that is arriving next month!

Good-bye to MRC-Dunn (Brad's lab)

Brad had an incredible experience with his lab in Cambridge. He got on "brillliantly" (a British term) with his boss/ PI (Primary Investigator) and they would have long one-to-one conversations about science. Every day the lab would have lunch together and they would always tease Brad about his peanut-butter/ jelly sandwiches (Brad's favorite) and his obsession with American cookies Nilla wafers. Lunch included for Brad many cultural lessons in the differences between England and the US. They were a really nice group of people that Brad enjoyed getting to know.

They were very kind to have a good-bye dinner in his honor that the girls and I were invited to attend, but because of the hour of the dinner I thought it best that we say good-bye during the day. So Brad's last week, we brought Chelsea Buns and lemon cake from the infamous Fitzbillies to share with everyone. Jillian had a little crush (and I think it was definitely reciprocated) on Ian. The pictures are adorable. I know Brad is missing his work there but he is also excited to be progressing with the next steps that will allow him to complete his PhD!

Last Bike Ride

One of Brad's and my favorite memories of England was our bike rides together as a family. Cambridge is a beautiful city and it was refreshing to be able to bike to the park, church, even to the store for groceries. It was also fun for Brad and I to discover something new that we both really enjoy doing together. :)

(It was a little sad for us to leave our trailer in England, but it made us happy to sell our Chariot to our friends. Casper and Martina are now getting to enjoy the trailer with their two little girls! )

Playing with Bubbles!

Jillian playing bubbles with Maschal (friend from Pakistan), big sister Charlotte (friends from Switzerland), and soon-to- be big sister Leni (friend from New Zealand). Jillian misses her girl friends at Clare Hall, but is enjoying meeting new friends.

Friends with New Babies!

England Memories

I purposely waited to "blog" most of our last days in England. It was an emotional time for us and I just wanted to savor every moment and not think too much about that these were our good-byes to the people and places we came to love. This is my first "installment" of more posts to come in the near future (at least that is my hope, I have been a bad blogger recently).

I spend the time doing this because Brad has accurately called our blog our family's "on-line scrapbook". Blogging has been a way for me to reflect/ journal on some of the memories we have made together, while sharing them with our family and friends who are far away. :)

One of the most exciting things we shared with friends before we left was the news of an expectant arrival, getting to watch our friend Kristin's bump grow and the arrival of a baby girl to our friends Martina and Casper. It was really hard to leave those friends. But we are thankful for the time we had with them.


Martina with baby Josephine (5 weeks old in this photo)! Martina and I really enjoyed our time together with our four girls. We had several "picnics" (cookies and fruit) out on the lawn and would talk all about our adjustment in becoming moms to two!


Josh and Brad on our double date at Bella Italia


The four of us haven't had much time together just the adults! As a special good-bye to one another, we went out to eat at our favorite Italian restaurant in town. Our sweet friend Anna Thompson babysat for us...thank you Anna! :)


When Kristin and Josh returned from their trip to the States (last December), we told them our news that we were going to be moving in April or May. Kristin immediately asked, "couldn't you wait until after August?". I was confused initially that she wanted us to stay until then, but then I thought, "Oh, maybe, she just wants us to be able to enjoy the summer here!". But the truth of the matter was that she was expecting her 3rd baby (they told us the news on Christmas Eve) and baby boy Irvine is due in August. We can't wait to see photos!


Just a couple of weeks before we left, Maria and Jon told us the news that they were expecting their second baby. Their eldest daughter, Leni, was a miracle baby. They didn't think they would be able to have any more children, but God has answered our prayers and blessed them again! (This picture was taken minutes after I found out the news and she is only a few weeks along!). I can't wait to see some photos of Maria with a bump!



Brad and I discovered through Maria's jazz concert that we are big fans of JAZZ! Maria is an incredibly gifted musician. We have one of the songs she wrote on our I-tunes music selection (we told her how much we loved it and she gave the song to us)! "When Daylight Falls" (available for purchase in the UK but not in the US) is a beautiful song and would be a perfect wedding song. I ALMOST wish I were getting married to Brad again, so we could have it at our wedding, but maybe for one of our anniversary's we can have it as part of a celebration :) My favorite line is a Biblical allusion "Let us run the race set before us".


A picture of Maria and me after her concert! It was one of the few dates Brad and I have had since Faith was born. We had the best time. It was really relaxing and we loved the meaning behind the songs she has chosen to sing. (My many thanks to Beth who rode her bike over at the last moment notice to babysit our girls! I miss you Beth.)

We All Make Mistakes

I HATE making mistakes and I try so hard NOT to make mistakes. When making a decision, I try to be extremely thoughtful and conscientious of the consequences to my decisions. And yet, with all of my thought and consideration, I still make mistakes. Every time I mess up, I feel HORRIBLE. So much so, that I have come to the point that I will do whatever I have to to avoid making a mistake, including not making a decision (which is a decision in of itself, and a poor decision, as well as a MISTAKE...oh, the irony!)

But seriously, I get so frustrated with myself, I am like "how could I do something stupid AGAIN!" I thought I had learned my lesson, and yet here I am again reaping the consequences of another poor decision! Sometimes, its as simple as me wishing I had waited a couple more days to buy eye-liner, because the next week it was half off and I paid FULL price!!! Ugh! I know that is not something to lose sleep over, but I sometimes wish I knew the future. I wish I knew the perfect plan for my life, I wish I knew exactly what my life was supposed to look like.

There are times when I feel like I don't want to LIVE by God's Grace each and every day! I want the BIG picture, what are we moving toward? It is so hard living by faith sometimes and being dependent on God's grace in my life. In my pride and desire for control, I want to the live the "perfect" life all by myself. I want to have everything figured out and not have to submit to God. And yet, I am so thankful that I don't have to live this life by my own strength, wisdom, or even my own "goodness".

I am so thankful that I make mistakes, big ones and small ones, because it reminds me how far I fall short of God's glory, His perfection. Even with all of my imperfections, my Heavenly Father accepts and loves me. He is far more patient with me than I am with myself.

When I ask God, "Why do you not just give up on me? I keep messing up and I am not going to stop messing up anytime soon." His response to me is, "I love you Lauren. I love you unconditionally, with ALL of your mistakes, past, present and future. There isn't anything you can do that will make me stop loving you. You are mine. You are my daughter, who I love. The price has already been paid for your "mistakes", as well as your sins."

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Today, I told Jillian, "Mommy made a mistake".

She looked at me, nodded with understanding and said "Jillian made a mistake."

I was so touched by her empathy, I gave her the biggest hug and kiss.

Jillian figured that she must have said something good, so she added, "Daddy made a mistake too".

I replied with a smile, "yes". Then she asked, "Faith make mistake too?".

I said, "Yes, we ALL make mistakes. "

Jillian looked at me and repeated enthusiastically, "We ALL make mistakes".

I smiled at her and agreed again. She then went on playing with her car. As she "drove" her car, she said a number of times... "We ALL make mistakes". It was music to my ears as I listened to my little girl say those words so cheerfully. You would think she was singing "Jingle Bells" it was such a merry tune! :)

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It is my prayer and desire that Jillian and Faith will know that when they make mistakes they will still be LOVED by me, their daddy, and most importantly their Heavenly Father. I know that our Heavenly Father desires an intimate relationship with both of my little girls. I just pray that their hearts will be open to receive His love and acceptance and that HE would be the LORD of their lives.

More Pictures of our Growing Baby Girl!

Happy Father's Day to PawPaw and Grandad!

We Love You Paw Paw and Grandad! :-)


At our flat in Cambridge- Luke, Jillian, and PawPaw


Jillian asleep on PawPaw's lap going from London to Paris on the Eurostar.


MiMi and PawPaw holding Jillian's hand in Maryland!


Faith immediately fell in love with her Grandad!


Grandad with Jillian and Faith-- lots of SMILES!

Our 8 Month Old Cutie!

Faith has grown so much! She is now sitting up on her own really well and is acting like she is going to start crawling any day now. She has loved having her sister's old exersaucer to play with and has been eating lots more solids since we have been in America. She is an absolute sweetie. :-)

Shepherd's Pie

Hi Everyone!

I feel like it has been so long since I have blogged that I need to re-introduce myself! No, not really, but it has been a long time since I have updated our blog. We have been staying super busy and we have been re-introducing ourselves to America. All of it seems so surreal to us, we are definitely still experiencing "reverse culture shock", but we are having a lot of fun too!

Last weekend we went to two community garage-sales for a couple of hours in the morning (its a good thing our girls wake up at 6:30 I guess!). I was on the look-out for some baskets to put toys in for our living room, but we hit the "jack pot" with a red coupe car for Jillian for $2 instead and I found some great girl clothes for $0.50 a piece (some new with tags!).

We also made our first trip to the mall this last week. As an early Father's Day gift to Brad we ate at a Thai place and had Mango Chicken! Then on Wednesday night, we went to the library as a family. It is located in the Rockville city center. We checked out some books and as we came out we discovered Wed. night is the summer concert night. They had a great band playing and we just enjoyed the atmosphere for a little bit.

We don't know how long we will be here in Maryland, so we are trying to a soak in all there is to do in this area. We are planning on going to a Heritage Culture Day for Montgomery County next weekend. The list of things we want to see and do here is long, which I think is a lot of fun!

But mostly we are just trying to adjust to being back. We have had to re-purchase a lot of things (and are in still in the process of doing that), because we didn't keep a lot of things in an effort to minimize what we stored. I definitely am able to see that prices have inflated quite a bit since we left two years ago. But thankfully we have found some real bargains (as well as have made some real boo-boos, but because I am the narrator, I will tell you only the happy-ending stories). :-)

The greatest need that we had for our house was a table and chairs. We sat on the ground for over a week to eat all of our meals, so I was really eager to find something/ anything that we could use. I went to used furniture places, as well as several furniture stores desperately trying to find something that would work (and hoping for a spectacular, unbeatable sale). I spent hours looking and I finally resolved that I may have to spend a lot more than I wanted to spend for something that wasn't exactly what we were looking for.

I said a prayer and told God that I needed His help, because I was having no "luck" finding anything (I was quite frustrated by my lack of success at that point). The Lord reminded me that He knew my needs and that I shouldn't stress about it, I just needed to re-release my need to him. After having this conversation with God, I looked at Craig's List for the zillionth time hoping that something would be there... and not 10 minutes earlier a lady had posted a cherry table with 6 chairs and a side board for $300! I immediately e-mailed, and someone else had already beaten me to it. But she said that she really wanted to "give" it to a family who was just starting out and that turned out to be us! I looked up the retail value of the table and chairs and as new it retails for $3000! To top that, my parents wanted to give us a homewarming gift so they gave us the money to purchase it! :)

Jillian is adjusting well and is finally getting to the point where she doesn't throw up every time we get in the car! Yippee for that! Also, Jillian loves being a helper. She helps set the table nearly every night now and she likes to help mommy make her bed in the morning too. In addition, we have had a couple of play dates since being back. She has gotten to play with Boston and Simran Rosborough and Jack Schumacher!

She also has gotten to play with new toys! It is quite funny (in retrospect of course) but I was concerned about Jillian not having many toys to play with when we got back, because we gave a lot of things away when we were moving back. But upon our arrival here, our friends the Rosborough's gave us their "old" play kitchen and a grocery cart for Jillian. My friend Kristen gave us some dolls and a little baby doll crib. And another fun toy has been her new big wheel from MiMi and PawPaw. She loves going down to the basement to play with it! I have set up an area for Faith to play with a 5 X7 carpet that our friends the Wyatt's gave us. We also were given a beautiful hand-painted "bureau" (from our friends Elliott's friends) that we store games/ puzzles and have a CD player on to listen to music while down there.

How I am writing I am sure it looks like we have not bought anything ourselves! But I assure we have spent quite a bit of money (for our budget) trying to re-acquire what we need to function here, but God has been so faithful to us. He is providing abundantly for us and we feel so blessed that others have shared some of their things with us!

Brad has settled back into work and things are really starting to pick up speed for him. He is glad to be back to the NIH, but really misses his old co-worker friends. He is currently riding the bus to the metro station, and then taking the train straight to the NIH campus. It is a longer commute then he had in Cambridge, but is able to get a little work done on the train.

Final thing I will say is I was missing England so much today, I decided to make Shepherd's Pie for our dinner tonight! If I must say myself (and I will) it turned out really well! Just like eating scones and tea conjures up memories for me, so does this remind me of the meals church members brought us right after Faith was born! I miss our friends in Cambridge, the beauty of England, and I even miss British Food!!!

Please keep our family in your prayers as we continue to adjust to our new home. Pray for new relationships/ friendships and wisdom for us as make many decisions. Your prayers mean so much.

With Love and Appreciation,

Lauren