Extended blog-cation!

Wow! So it has been a loooong time since I have written. Well a lot has happened in the last month an a half. Madison celebrated her first Birthday with a proper British tea party. We had about thirty guests packed into our house! We enjoyed chicken salad and cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sponge cake and blueberry scones. Adam turned the big 3-0 and I managed to surprise him with a "Pub Crawl"About twenty friends came out to see him bid farewell to his twenties. We hopped from bar to bar all thru the beautiful town of Ely! We also had Granna here to celebrate with us! We had such a fun visit! Adam and I even got to go on an overnight trip to London! Granna and Maddie had a super fun slumber party while Adam and I had a fancy dinner and saw a show. Maddie loved having Granna in England to read, play with her fun toys, go shopping and on lots of walks (which Sonnie love too)! Adam deployed for three weeks so Madison and I are visiting the states:) More pictures to come (these are only from my IPad)

New Pictures

Eeek! Sorry it's been so long since I've posted! We haven't been up to much here. A couple of weekends ago we went to London and visited friends. They are friends stationed at Mildenhall they just live in London. Madison stayed with them and then Adam and I went exploring for a while. We visited the Borough Market, Shakespeare's Globe and the Tate Modern Museum. Apparently Adam and I must not appreciate "art" because most of everything displayed was underwhelming to say the least. We had a pretty good time laughing at all of this "art". Here are some new Maddie pictures and some from our day in London.

Christmas

This year was kind of bittersweet. It was Madison's first Christmas which was exciting to read her Christmas stories and open presents (mostly she just played with the wrapping paper) and play with her new toys. On the other hand we were pretty homesick and missing Adam's dad:( We just tried to keep ourselves busy. On Christmas Eve we attended a carol service at the beautiful Ely Cathedral and on Christmas Day we celebrated with the Royals.  The Royal family has a Christmas house about an hour away so this being our last Christmas in England we had to take advantage and get a peek at the royal family! Every year the family walks to the Church on their property for service. The public lines up along the path and the Royals greet people along their walk. We got there pretty early so we got a really good spot! There were an estimated 3,000 people there! After their service children line up to present to Queen with flowers which happened to be right in front of us! It was pretty exciting- we got to see Prince William, Kate, Prince Harry, some of the cousins and of course the Queen, just feet away!

 

 

 

Normandy Part 2

Normandy was an amazing experience! While there we visited two museums, one dedicated to the British war effort and one for D-Day at Utah Beach. We also visited Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Point du Hoc, a German gun battery, and the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach. It was truly a humbling experience, so many lives were sacrificed there for our freedom!

 On the way to the war sites Maddie wanted to stop in a really cute small town.

The British floated over a port from England.

 These German guns could shoot over 8 miles out to sea.

 This one was destroyed by a hand grenade.

 The craters at Point Du Hoc are still there.

 The American Cemetery was an incredibly sad sight to see.  It took our breath away.

 The D-Day Museum at Utah Beach.

Normandy- Part one

Over Thanksgiving weekend we took a quick trip to Normandy France. We love France so it was nice to go back. We had a great time except for the food poisoning Adam got the last evening there:/ On our way to our hotel, we stopped in a cutsie little town for lunch and to do some cider tasting. Everything was closed but we managed to find one creperie open- what more did we need. We tried some cider also! It was really good! The cider is made from different varieties of pressed apples and then bottled. Once opened it  tastes a lot like Champagne. Here are a few pictures from my IPad, I will post more from my camera another day.