A Belated Post

We are expecting our first visitors this week, which is very exciting--I feel so fortunate that my folks are able to come. When I studied at Harlaxton, my folks were doing all they could for me to be here, and my brother was still in high school, etc…so it wasn't the time. I really envied my friends whose parents got to visit. Three years ago, my folks joined me for a three-week Interterm in London, and we briefly visited Harlaxton then, but it's a real dream come true to have a couple of weeks with them in the English Midlands.

The end of this week will be a month at Harlaxton. Of course I knew it would fly by, but gosh has it flown by. Homework is real, eating meals in the refectory is real….and so are the intense joys of traveling. Since I've last written we've had a few "local-ish" adventures, and they've all been grand, but we've also learned that one "big" day in the weekend is about our speed, especially with the realities of homework and laundry and time for the kids to just play and ride their bikes.

On Saturday the 10th we spent the day in Cambridge, returning first to the American cemetery at Madingley, then visiting King's College Chapel, the market, the Eagle pub, and Fitzbillies before finishing our day with a punt on the cam. That was the highlight for me, though I had to really dial-it-back with my obnoxious hand-raising as the punter was asking questions about the Tudors. Shades of fifth-grade Robyn at the Geography Bee, for those of you who remember that story. The kids loved the Fitzbillies sweets and mostly enjoyed the attention of the college students on the trip, who carried them on their shoulders through the cemetery. Our boys are still really invested in identifying "my friend" and "your friend" and maybe that’s' a product of being one of three? Sacou's hair is a little long and he's been asking to wear a man-bun to school based on a student named Nick's follicular choices, and Gabe loves to boss the older kids around. Tonight is the first night that we've asked a student to play with the boys while Ebi does homework, as I'm teaching still at the 4 p.m. hour--with three, it's always zone defense.

Sunday we drove to the coast, a drive I'd not done for 18 years since I'd visited the wash with my Meet-a-Family in 1998; there was a festival at Sandringham, which slowed us down, and Ben started to feel flu-y, which is a bad deal when I can't drive manual, but we landed in Wells-next-the-Sea and walked along the beach wall while Ben slept, having great seafood (kids tried, and LIKED, herring roll mops!) and played on a pirate ship during the Pirate Festival, then took a miniature train back to dad, and spent about an hour as a family (Ben only marginally recovered) at Holkham Beach. I loved Norfolk, as I'd suspected I would--there is a village called Little Snoring! We elected to extend our time at the beach and missed refectory dinner (NO REGRETS) and were very tired, but were also really glad to have made the trip.

Ebi started Girl Guides on Monday night, and she has to make a tough decision soon about a Harry Potter-themed camping weekend or a trip with the family; we scrapped plans to make the family go to Stratford for a THREE HOUR showing of Cymbeline by the RSC (so still no Stratford for me) and I'm adjusting to the horrible news about The Great British Baking Show, my Wednesdays this fall made even more bittersweet for their brevity. On Wednesday Ben and I got colleagues and students to help make it possible for us BOTH to go TOGETHER to Stamford, which I loved (cheese shop, William Cecil's tomb and a second-hand bookstore-cum-taxidermy shop!) and on Thursday I forewent my spot on the Lincoln trip so Ben could see Lincoln, which I love but had just visited in June on the alumni trip. My Thursday was good, too, though, as I realized that it was the first day I'd been by myself in nearly five weeks. Some people don't believe this, but I am an introvert, and that can make some aspects of the Harlaxton and traveling-with-family-for-five months experience challenging. In our downtime, Ben and I are working through Game of Thrones and I'm on book six of the Maisie Dobbs series, which I love, but there is not a lot of downtime. Friday night Ben and I had a date night, back to Lincoln, to an atmospheric tapas bar with great sangria and a long walk by the cathedral at night, and our choice to cancel Stratford worked out because we spent Saturday at the fantastic Belton House, which appealed to me because of the former owner's role in Edward VI's abdication, appealed to Ben because of the photography opps and the cricket game on the lawn, and appealed to the kids because of the SWEET adventure playground on-site, which is great for parents, too, as we read and drank tea and chatted while they played for nearly three hours. Grand.  We also tried another Grantham restaurant, Nepalese this time, which we enjoyed. And yesterday, Sunday, we had a Sunday lunch in Woolsthorpe before spending the afternoon at Belvoir Castle, home of the 11th Duke of Rutland, another place I'd not been for 18 years. The gardens have since been restored and are quite beautiful, and we had fun at lunch with a colleague, Amber, whom the kids adore. They also did really well on the nearly two-hour tour of the house, which is only mildly-appealing to kids because the swords and bayonets are sweet but who cares about a Hans Holbein portrait of Henry VIII when you're five? Ebi is studying the Tudors this year, though, so she was pretty keen on the portrait.

I know this sounds silly and privileged, but life here is so full it can be hard to find time to plan trips, but Ben and I have Dover and Canterbury on the horizon with my folks, and a canal trip on the Grantham canal. We've booked a long-weekend in Edinburgh, and are visiting Northumberland with Cristin, Caitlin, Esme and Fiona when they visit. Esme is visiting us here at Harlaxton in a couple of weeks, and I am jazzed about a nice tea shop in Grantchester where I'll pretend to be a 1950s vicar. Look, here's what I've done: I've played Wallander in Sweden, and will play Mary Russell in Sussex, Maisie Dobbs in Kent, and basically Sherlock Holmes and Ned Stark everywhere else I go. I play Hermoine Granger here at Harlaxton quite a lot. It's fantastic. Travel choices are being largely made upon this basis. We are weighing up the Costwolds or Cornwall, and just enjoying the beauty of where we are at present, too.  Thanks for reading.

All the Things

I am finding it helpful to focus on having one or two positive experiences each day with the kids, and with travel, rather than taking the day as a whole. No surprise there--this seems to be a lesson I must learn again and again, to manage my expectations. One Saturday the positive event was finding a fantastic Indian restaurant in Grantham and then introducing the kids to Costa coffee hot chocolate; one Sunday it was the lovely service at St. Mary and St. Peter, Harlaxton, and the nice chat with parishoners and my Meet-a-Family from 1998; it's been a nice walk along the Grantham canal, or our first walk as a family along the mile to the Greg, or the beautiful sunset behind Belvoir Castle on a Friday evening, after introducing the kids and Ben to Eton Mess. It's been seeing the kids' excitement and adorable-ness when they tried on their school uniforms, or gratitude that they have playmates here, or the beauty of the fields post-harvest around the manor. It's getting stuck in to the fifth installment of the Maisie Dobbs series that the librarian graciously bought for me, getting to know some new colleagues, and seeing the kids find the Harlaxton bikes (thank you, Zyggy!). There are many, many kind people here at Harlaxton, and I've enjoyed my students, too, grateful that I seem to have a good group from Baker. Oh--it's the first bubble bath I've taken in 12 years (glorious) and the fun of watching people discover the joys of travel for the first time.

Figuring out transportation to school has been a larger, more ambiguous and more frustrating task than I'd hoped. There are six primary-school-aged children at Harlaxton this fall, and, while we were informed in July that we'd need to taxi the children to school, the numbers (and even our family, on outings) requires a minibus or two taxis, and costs £18 each way rather than the £6 that we'd heard and begun to budget for. We considered multiple alternatives and it's been like a logic puzzle; we even joked that maybe we should consider boating the children to school on the Grantham canal, but we always came to the same answer with respect to cost, time for the children, and energy given for the accompanying parent. The smartest financial move was to rent a car, which cost us roughly $12 a day for the three months we need it. We got the car on Saturday this week (school started Monday) and I felt immediate freedom. I am also disappointed in myself, as I wanted to be a person who relied more on public transportation and saw Britain again by train, as I did in 1998 and 2003, but ease and freedom win, and we are privileged to have that choice. Update--we're now three days into school and I am so relieved we went with car. Easy for me to say as I wave to the kids each morning as they drive away with Ben, but I did get to do pick up yesterday afternoon and all is going smoothly. Ebi made "9 friends" on the first day and is having that intense pleasure of being a novelty--she starts Girl Guides on Monday and has met another Eboni in her grade, and the boys just report that "the other kids were naughty, but I listened, and there are computers in my classroom." Sacou is learning to read and we sat last night on a bench looking out over the vale of Belvoir, so, all in all, not a bad place to read with one's child. I still have some anxiety about the academic demands of school in the U.K., but they are young, and seemingly open to change, and I am grateful for that.

We took advantage of that vehicle-having-freedom right away on Sunday and traveled to Calke Abbey, which I'd read about this summer in Bill Bryson's latest, The Road to Little Dribbling. It's a once-great-estate (I'm sure I read 28,000 acres in its heyday) that saw the passing and near-financial-ruin of its last direct descendant in 1989. The National Trust has chosen to repair, not restore, the property and there is peeling ceilings and paint and dusty rooms filled with treasures--the Harpur-Crewe family were great lovers of natural history, and collectors, particularly during the Victorian period, and were basically hoarders as we'd understand it today. Prior to the last descendant's passing, many rooms of the house were closed off to save money at the end of the Edwardian period, and it's all a bit sad, and creepy. As a psychologist, it's clear evidence of a family history of mental illness, too--one baronet only communicated with his servants by note, shut his once-a-lady's-maid wife off from the rest of society, and asked to have the dining table set for company every night but always dined alone. I loved the gardens, the good-ish weather, the playground for the kids, their engagement with the house itself, and all the sheep. Calke Abbey is near Melbourne, England, home of Captain Cook, so Ben made some fun connections too. There's also two bird-hides on the property and lots of room to run, so it was a good day.

Last Friday I took and early train to London to visit Freud's home with students--it exceeded my expectations, and reminded this "seasoned" psychologist how much I owe Freud for the profession I love. Outside of being in his space and admiring Freud for his genius and curiosity and liberal-mindedness, I loved the education director, Stefan, and experienced not a little transference! in trying to impress the clever young psychoanalyst with my questions. I was back by mid-afternoon (after a shameful and comforting stop at Chipotle) but I liked being reminded how easy it is to get to London, even for half a day.

One other struggle we've had, and this is the outside of my sharing comfort zone here, is figuring out the right balance on managing the kids' behavior and our expectations of the kids. There's been some highs--they sat through convocation last week and the high table dinner, and were delightful--and they are generally respecting our rule that we eat dinner as a family (not with their peers or college-student buddies). The challenging behavior is all expected--picking on each other, resisting bedtime, trying to eat multiple desserts, having a food fight in the new rental car (THANK GOD it wasn't in the refectory)….and that's tiring but part of it. The tough part of managing behavior is doing it a) with an audience of 200 people and b) with the underlying terror that I'm doing it wrong and not enough or too much or in a way that means that we'll not be invited back or will become a family that stories are told about or the kids who break something priceless or end up at the bottom of a well somewhere in the woods and then the news follows us for three days until Sacou (because it would be Sacou) is rescued and then there are follow-up stories on every major milestone he hits and we get a Wikipedia page and we become the people that get talked about like the family whose son got in the gorilla cage or was drowned by an alligator at a Disney resort or I'll spend the whole fall so anxious about it all that I won't be present and who wants to remember those five months of their childhood that mom was a glass case of emotion because our family comes first, even before Harlaxton and IT'S EXHAUSTING so let it go already and why can't they just appreciate how marvelous this is and just get over the stupid broken crayons in your cheap packet that I bought you as a distraction so I could wonder around the market, dammit. Another update: This has gotten WAY easier since school has started and since all three of our children have fallen in total love with the Baker students who have spent the past two evenings riding bikes, playing soccer, and even cutting up their dinner for our kids, (who are wholly capable of cutting up their own dinner). Sacou had a dream this Monday evening, (just before the first of two Harlaxton fire alarms) that he and Thor saved one of the students from a fire and has been talking about it on the reg--he is very proud of himself, and one can assume that Sacou was hero and Thor just had an assist.

Yesterday, Wednesday, was a great day--"gong-ing" the start of British Studies in the morning, doing my first barista shift in the bistro, having a day date with Ben at The Greg, and even reading for pleasure a bit. I'm having the joy, once again, that comes from travel, of re-evaluating the way you do things at home--not having all the time planned, rejecting FOMO, and just sitting and talking with your partner, which is sometimes difficult to do in our life in the U.S. I had two glasses of wine before bed and watched the Bakeoff with some colleagues (my favorites are still in), so a fantastic day.

This weekend we're off to Cambridge and the coast, just day trips, and Ben is going to a nature preserve on Friday to go birding while I teach. Friday evening we're getting the "secret tour" from Andy, who will show the kids secret staircases, and Monday and Tuesday are time for the first round of exams.

Thanks for reading-

R