Big Church Day Out

For our first music festival experience as a family, we couldn't have asked for a better one.  We were blessed with a rare 2-days of glorious sunshine and temps in the mid 60s.  We arrived in West Sussex, down on the southern coast of England in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday.  The festival was held on the grounds of Wiston House, which was a beautiful venue.  Here is a photo of Mia standing with Wiston House in the background.

Anyone who really knows me, will know that Christian music is a HUGE part of my life.  So as you can imagine, I was quite excited about this festival.  So many bands that I listened to in the US were coming and some British and Irish artists that I've fallen in love with over the last 2 years were there too!  I was most excited about a relatively new band called Rend Collective Experiment and they did not disappoint.  Through our church here I've also become very familiar with the songs of Matt Redman, and it was such a treat to have him be the final act of the weekend....finishing of course with 10,000 Reasons.  

We all had a fabulous time and look forward to attending more festivals in the states when we come home.  Hopefully we'll be able to get some friends to come along next time ;-).

 Here are all the girls, sporting our new BCDO T-shirts...a lamb with big headphones on!

 One of the early acts on Sunday...Jars of Clay!

Happy New Year Everyone!

For the first time we watched the London New Year celebration exactly 5 hours before our friends and family in New York.  It was quite spectacular with fireworks shooting out of the Big Ben Clock Tower and from the London Eye Ferris Wheel.  Here's a youtube video of the celebration:

We hope you all have a wonderful new year!

Halloween in the UK

This year Halloween was a little bit different for us.  We had been told that Halloween is "darker" here...more witches and devils, evil characters...less cartoon characters and princesses, etc.  We were also told that Trick-or-Treating is not as common.  It does exist here, but there are many that don't want to participate, and it's not for religious reasons.  I heard one person say that they consider trick-or-treating a form of begging. 

Since the kids don't dress up in costumes at school and we weren't sure about the trick-or-treating, we didn't do costumes this year.  I can't say I really mind, it's always been a bit of a chore for me anyway.   On the Saturday before Halloween, our church held a Krazy Kings night, which was a Halloween alternative event.  The kids got to dress up as Kings and Queens if they wanted to, played games, made crowns, and got to do some of the messy things that often happen at Halloween parties (i.e. fishing candy out of buckets of Goo, sticking their faces in jello to grab candy with their teeth, eating donuts off strings, etc.)  They also got to learn about the wicked King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.  The kids had a great time!

On Halloween, we carved some pumpkins and  lit them in the front garden.  We noticed that some of the other households had done the same...that was kind of the sign for each house that Trick-or-Treaters were welcome.  On a street that has many young children, none of them came trick or treating.  We just had 4 Trick-or-Treaters and they were all probably at least 12 years old.  The costumes were all bloody and dark as expected. 

The only child that was sad about not trick-or-treating was Alexa...but she was happy to learn that the remainder of the 4 bags of candy that I bought would be for us to enjoy!

Now that Halloween is over, the Christmas shopping season is in full swing.  The Christmas displays started coming out in Mid October actually.  Remember, there's no Thanksgiving here, so there's no reason for the stores to hold back on putting out their Winter Wonderland displays.  It's funny.  And we thought Christmas came early in the States.