An Eventful Time in the UK

As organised as you can try and be, nothing ever works out quite as planned. We spent almost a month back in the UK with a very full schedule in the diary ... but 24 hours after we arrived in the country we knew it wasn't going to work out as we had expected.

Jenny's nan passed away the morning after we landed in England. She had been really ill the previous couple of weeks and we were able to visit her the morning we arrived. It was great we were able to see her and felt the timing was perfect in many ways as we were able to help Jenny's mum with all the details of funerals and other things. 

We made the decision early on that although we would keep our main speaking engagements our priority would be to help out and we're really grateful to those of you we were supposed to be seeing for being so understanding when we had to change or cancel plans.

We did manage to see some (but not all) of our family and close friends ... met Popeye's gorgeous little puppies and Abigail had fun colouring with Auntie Betty (who turned 95 last week ... Happy Birthday Betty!).

We also made it to see friends in Oxford and a little All Nations reunion in Birmingham ... with a few extra little people in our midst since we were all last together! Thanks to the Lynch's for hosting us all!

Abigail made herself some new friends ... all of whom she continues to tell us are 'her favourite' ... everything is 'her favourite' at the moment. She also continued to love and be extremely goofy with her little sister while we we away!

We did take Nana to the seaside one day ... and had fun even though it was cold and wet and also took her to help at the paint your own pottery morning we did.

In our final week we planned to catch up with some of our missed appointments as well as fulfilling the plans we'd made before heading back home to the States. Those plans were also thwarted when one-by-one we all managed to pick up a variety of virsuses, chest infections, gastric flu, ear infections ... etc etc etc ... almost to the point that we wondered if we would be fit to fly home last week.

As a result of all this we didn't take too many photos or have lots of exciting stories to tell. We do know each other a bit better than we did before and what we can cope with ... so that is definitely something positive that has come out of a trip that was completely different from what we had envisaged.

We made it home to small town Ohio last Tuesday and although we're still not recovered from the sickness almost 3 weeks later, we're really happy to be back with our own home comforts. We're all thriving a bit more being back into a 'normal' routine ... just need to get 100% healthy now.

To those of you we did see ... we really enjoyed it ... for those we didn't, we hope that next year goes slightly more to plan!!