We punted and it wasn't even 4th down

It was a gorgeous Saturday morning. Beautiful blue skies, crisp leaves, and football was in the air. A perfect day for tailgating, but not a football game within 3,000 miles to watch. Ah, but what a great day to watch college football on TV...but not a single game on any of our 5 channels. So we decided to take a road trip. Being college football day, we went to the name-sake of an Ivy League town, Cambridge. We first stopped at Lincoln, in the heart of Lincolnshire. Here you see Abe and Zeke at the top of a hilly street with Lincoln Cathedral in the background. It is nearly 1000 years old. There are several places on the outside, on the baptism font, and in the stained glass that have mythical beasts fighting, representing the battle between good and evil. There are 2 huge stained glass 'eyes' in the transepts (see Abe and Zeke standing below). The north window guards against the powers of darkness and the south welcomes the light. Of course our visit to the Cathedral wasn't all fun and games. You can see how somber my boys are, matching the ambiance portrayed by the statue. My baby is so dramatic; he was born in the 'theatre', you know.Whilst in Cambridge, the best way to see the city is to 'Punt the River.' It's a little like Italy where you use a long pole to move your boat up and down the river. We opted to have a professional do the punting for us and give a guided tour, but others chose to do it themselves. As you can see, there were a few traffic jams...rookies. Behind all the punters is the Bridge of Sighs. It's modeled after the real Bridge of Sighs in Italy, where the prison and execution site were on opposite sides of the bridge; in Cambridge there is an exam hall on one side and final grades are posted on the other side. A scene from Harry Potter was shot in this courtyard. It's where they were playing quidditch. The ivy on the walls was really pretty. This is the actual Cam Bridge. The bridge was built and named the Cam Bridge, so they changed the name of the river to the River Cam. A bit backwards thinking, but you know how those Brits are. This is one of the upper class colleges within Cambridge University, but I can't remember which. One night someone, whom one can only guess had spent quite a bit of time at the local pub, crawled up to the top and put a traffic cone on one of the spiral things at the top. The university jumped right on it and after a few weeks began the long construction of scaffolding to reach the top. When the scaffolding was nearly finished someone climbed up in the middle of the night again and moved the traffic cone to the other spiral. It took the university a couple months in total to finally get the cone off. Here is Newton's Mathematical Bridge from the underside. When he created it, it did not need any nuts or bolts to hold it together; the weight of itself was all it needed. Years later some students took it apart and could not reconstruct it properly, so now it has nuts and bolts. This is Queen's College, I think. The building is completely symmetrical except for the eagle's head in the middle because he's looking to the side. There is a round faceless clock on the front. The building and another one across the river were being built at the same time. There was a law that 2 buildings facing each other could not both have a clock, so the race was on to see who could finish first and keep their clock. The other building won so there is just a round blank clock face on the front.

Wrest Park is a mansion in Bedfordshire built in the 1600s.

Wrest Park Gardens was created by Henry de Grey 1st Duke of Kent in the first half of the 18th century. It is set on 92 acres. There are tree-lined walkways and paths and ponds and statues and buildings all over the place. It's not just a colloquialism; the grass is literally greener in England all year long because of all the rain.

Zeke's just thinking of our friends and family back home in America.
On the way home we stopped in Leicestershire. My favorite cheese, red leicester (pronounced /lester/) happens to be made there. But we stopped by Jewry Wall, not so named because of Jewish ancestry, but because of the type of architecture and the Latin root word. The remains of a Roman bath house are here. Their sophistication always amazes me, as this was made over 2000 years ago. The arches are raised up because the floor was level with the bottom of the frame, and the plumbing was in the basement. We also saw some excavated skeletons from the Roman times with their jewelry and stuff buried with them.
"Move it, buddy! It's going to be dark soon and I've got to get home!" Zeke may resemble the Daniels' side of the family, but he's got a bit of Grandpa Hoard in him. :)

Ezekiel 5 months

"Honey, did you get the passports?"

I'm a little embarrassed to admit we learned the hard way. We planned our 3rd anniversary trip for Dublin, Ireland. I had found real cheap tickets on the internet. This was our first big trip with The Boy; all of you veteran parents realize how much kit and kaboodle you gotta bring. I was feeling very boy scoutish because I had all his goods for any situation that you could imagine--2 changes of clothes a day, nappies, wipes, toys, teething gel, pain reliever, upset stomach medicine, blah, blah, blah. You name it, I had it. As we were getting out of the car at the airport I suddenly remembered that I forgot to put in the passports. Abe and I both usually remember important stuff like that. We usually check with each other that we remembered important stuff like that. Nope. Not this time. With only one hour before the flight and a 45 minute trip home and another 45 minutes back, we decided to give it the ole college try and use our photo ID's. Unfortunately I don't have a UK driver's license yet and my Texas one wouldn't work as a proper ID. We tried all kind of options: switching flights, going to another airport, waiting until the next day. The only option that would work was buying a really expensive ticket. I moped around the rest of the day and was quite pathetic. However, we rallied the troops and took a road trip the next day. Since Cadbury chocolate is one of our main food groups we decided to visit Cadbury World. (Well, that and the fact that we were vacationing with an infant, so our entertainment choices were more limited than we were accustomed to.) It was very hands-on and we got lots of free chocolate. Then we continued down to Cardiff in southern Wales. We spent the day wondering around the city and took in Cardiff Castle. The Keep was quite old, but the newest part was built in the 1600s. It was actually a house of a really really rich family. He was the Bill Gates of Wales during that time. The house was over the top extravagant; one room had gold overlays on the ceiling. We also went down to Bath in southwest England. It is a quaint little town. Over all we had a nice anniversary trip, but it was a bit of a let down since we had planned Dublin...rookie mistake.

Ezekiel 4 months

Just Two Ladies of Leisure

Let The River Flow

Zeke went on his first overnight trip! On the way down to London to drop off Granny V we stopped off at Dover. Dover is famous for its White Cliffs and Dover Castle. The castle is very impressive located on top of the cliffs. It was built in the 1180s and is still in tact. They have a lot of Henry VIII's stuff in there. You may or may not remember that Henry is responsible for the Church of England because he wanted to divorce his first wife and the Pope wouldn't let him. There was also a lighthouse built by the Saxons that was 2000 years old and still standing. Pretty impressive masonry. The church next to it was 1000 years old. There was a really old bible sealed under glass that happened to be opened to the book of Ezekiel. He didn't understand why that was cool, but someday he'll appreciate it.

Anyway, the castle grounds are also famous for secret World War II tunnels dug into the cliffs. A whole bunch of soldiers were saved, like 338,000 or something because they were snuck across the chanel from Dunkirk in France into the tunnels. They have a tour of part of the tunnels where you can see the old theatre as they like to call it (we would call it surgery), the kitchen, and command rooms where Churchill made some decisions. They recreated sounds and smells for each room. The tunnels were so secretive the only way the historians could reconstruct it was because some guy illegally took photos and hid them away in his attic; his daughter eventually donated them so they could see how things looked back then.

The White Cliffs of Dover are gorgeous. There is a song about them because the soldiers flying home from war knew they were in the clear when they could see the cliffs. On a clear day you can see France, so we were told.

We were all knackered at the end of the day. Zeke was very happy to get to sleep with Mummy and Daddy all night. I woke at 3 am to hear him sucking his little hands, but he didn't cry. I think he was afraid that if he cried for food that I would realize he wasn't in his own cot and move him, so he decided to suck his hand instead of eat so he wouldn't have to sleep by himself. Such a sweet little boy. He loves his cuddles.

After dropping Granny V off at the airport we drove into London to the American Consulate to report Zeke's birth. We thought we had more than enough time, but the traffic took even longer than we expected--nothing new. We have a satellite navigation system and her voice is called Jane. Jane has treated us right over here, but she has issues with tall buildings. If you know Abe you know he REALLY hates to be late. So we're driving in crazy traffic, getting mixed signals from Jane The Pain--her nickname when she gets confused--and we smell poo in the back. The boy is crying in addition to the poo smell, so at a stoplight I jump in the back to pump some milk to feed him since we won't have time to feed him before the appointment, which is drawing nearer and nearer. I check his pants to make sure he didn't get them dirty because he still needed to get his photo for his passport. Bloody hell! There was a river of potty standing between his leg and the edge of the car seat. I kid you not--there was so much it was just standing there like New Orleans after the levee broke. I tried to do some quick damage control by sticking his burp rag and the only napkins we had in the car between Zeke's leg and the edge of the seat. Earlier that morning I told Abe to remind me to put more wipes in the diaper bag when we got home because we were nearly out...great timing. So we're deciding if we should stop somewhere to buy more wipes and clean him first, or keep driving and get closer to our destination, because we were going to be late for our appointment at the American Consulate of all places. So we decided to keep driving. Jane got us near Big Ben and Parliment. But the buildings down there are really tall, and you remember what I said about tall buildings. Jane began driving us in circles. Not exactly on the roundabout like Chevy Chase, but it was just as frustrating and the minutes kept ticking away. Then we heard it--more poo! For the love of Pete, stop pooping, Boy! The river had broken its dam and was flowing freely. Finally we knew we were close, so I said just find somewhere to park. Finding somewhere to park in downtown London is like trying to find a girl who sleeps with her lizard. As we all know, that's pretty hard to do, but not impossible. We happened to find a spot! Since we didn't have many wipes in the nappie bag, we just took the car seat out and stuck in on the pram (stroller) and began to power walk down the busy streets, dodging and weaving with the buggy full of baby and poo. After asking 2 people, we found the chemists (drugstore) who took proper passport photos. It was now past our appointment time. Abe grabbed a package of wipes and a package of toilet paper. I ripped into it and stripped The Boy of his clothes and tried to get the car seat clean whilst Abe paid for supplies. There was some good people-watching going on, but it was everyone else watching us. Once Zeke was clean and changed, Abe took his photo and I finished working on the pram. As soon as the photo was finished we literally ran out of the shop and down the street to the Consulate. There was a waiting line to get in! Once we got in there was another long waiting line to get to window 1, which was the one we needed. The good part about that was that they didn't care that we were late for our appointment. I don't know about you, but the American Consulate sounds so posh; I thought we would have a sit down and talk to someone at their desk. It was a cruddy old government building with long lines and waiting for your number to be called. But our son is officially an American citizen now! He even has his own passport and social security number. Thank goodness the trip home was much less eventful.

Ezekiel 3 months