bits and bants vol. 32

I went to England and it was predictably the dreamiest

Hello, hello fellow humans! It feels like a very long time since I’ve written in these imaginary pages so we’ll just have a bit of a catch up.

My April has seemed to fly by because I went to England for a week! It almost feels as if it didn’t really happen and was just a very long out of body experience or dream; which is to say it was such a great trip! It was a long planned trip for my husband’s fortieth birthday, mostly to see a Premier League football game which was one of my husband’s bucket list dreams. But very happily soccer coincides with my favourite place on earth so obviously I was very happy for this to be my husbands preferred choice of birthday trip! And to be honest, we aren’t super celebratory people, so this just seemed the perfect excuse or time to plan a European trip.

As you all know it is so hard to even commit to travelling just with your spouse when you’re in the midst of *waves arms like Kermit the Frog* family life. Time just seems to be speeding by us, we seem to always have important things on the calendar that would make getting away even for a week seem logistically impossible, things and issues come up with our kids or our extended family which take precedence over taking a vacation, and it is just extremely hard to get people to watch your kids for more than a night when you have more than one said kid it seems. We are so thankful that right now my husband’s job has a lot of vacation time so that isn’t an issue, and we have saved specifically for such a trip for a long time and since we apparently will never be able to find a house to actually buy, we thought we might as well take advantage of these savings. And because we’re millennials who have lived through one earth stopping event and many weird historic crises, we need to carpe the diem. And my kids are all basically adults, if we can’t leave them for a week now we honestly will never leave them. Which isn’t a bad thing either!

All that to say, planning this trip happened after our daughter’s major surgery so we knew that her recovery was going well, we took the one available week both sets of grandparents would accept extra lodgers, and just booked the plane tickets! We stayed in the Cotswolds for two days in a lovely, extremely old, and practically perfect in every way pub in Stow-on-the-Wold. The English countryside is a fairytale to me and I will never get over it. When I think of the happiest place on earth, the place I could go if you could magically snap me there in a moment, it would be the English countryside. The fact that it exists makes me happy. Just thinking of being there fills me with happiness. And thinking of being happy always takes place in the setting of the English countryside. I’m basically hopeless.

We explored lovely Stow, famous for the beautiful church doors surrounded by hundreds year old yew trees that inspired Tolkien, walked to neighbouring villages which were equally perfectly charming, and ate and drank in pubs along the way. We even had sunshine and me getting stuck in muddy fields and cursing audibly.

Our four days in London were so much fun, packed from morning to night seeing the sights, taking the tube, and seeing lots of football. The weather was perfect for three out of the four days we were there, and the tulips in the parks were in full bloom! The football fans were largely very entertaining, except for the away fans who were victorious at the Arsenal game we attended. But I did get to see people arrested and hauled out of the stadium by police all to the sounds of crude chants which was honestly a goal of mine.

A week away was the longest the two of us have been away together since having kids, and miraculously we never got tired of each other. I had fun at the football games, and my husband enjoyed seeing a play and getting dragged through palaces and gardens. We’re still so happy we went, it really was a great time and all the wonderful things you want from travel but with the added gift of spending great time together.

Ok, let’s stop there because there is only so much trip content people want to read before keeling over in boredom! I’ve spent the past week since we’ve been back basically trying to catch up on life from missing one week, and I’m almost there. The kids have been busy, school needed to get back on track, and I had to find 34 overdue library books. And it looks like I’ll be able to hopefully plant tomorrow. Just cold hardy flowers, we’ve got a little less than a month until our last frost date so I’m not getting ahead of myself, but even being able to work the ground and do some clean up and preparation in the garden feels so good at this point. However, the landscape is so brown, bare, and bleak that it makes me sad. I am so desperate for growth and green I could scream about five times a day about it.

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bits:

• being away from my regular consumption of the internet for a week left me feeling so behind and out of the loop! Which probably speaks to my addiction to internet information, but also to my love of the well-written and interesting things that truly are a marvel to be able to read everyday.

• I really find everything Paul Kingsnorth writes fascinating. This piece will be very much in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and their attitudes towards the English soul if you have read those writers, but also a very timely look at what’s happening now and its repercussions.

• This was a seemingly simple article on contemplation but the bit about making quiet time an end, and not a means really struck me this week. I think it may be because right now with big kids who are everywhere in all directions, and things are always loud, and there is always something happening, I still feel a strong pull towards providing quiet time in their days. They’re teenagers so obviously I’m not making them have quiet time like toddlers, and they do have a lot more going on, but at the same time I still think the value of quiet time doesn’t disappear because kids are older. I also feel very insecure about that feeling because everyone is meant to be having the. busiest. days. because. may. and every high schooler has 50 more extra curricular than my kids, so I feel a bit guilty at still having the pull towards simply providing opportunity for quiet time to exist in our home and our lives. It also completely goes against the grain of what is yelled at us ad nauseam as young moms when we’re told to get that quiet time in before your kids wake up because it’ll never happen if you don’t do it at the beginning of the day! But for the most part I have always had a quiet time for my kids during the day, and found it absolutely essential to my sanity and the sanity of all of us for their entire growing up. I’ve always been really turned off by the cultural attitude of kids being constantly entertained during their waking hours starting with toddlerhood, and parents having to put up with their children’s substandard behaviour when not being entertained at all times which I think happens when kids are overstimulated by never having quiet time! (My parenting book will be called: Stay With Me, It’s All Going to Circle Back Eventually) Of course we have to keep our kids constantly entertained because we’re all living lifestyles that usually involve working outside the home/school out of the home that forces us to conform to someone else’s timetable and schedule which makes actual parenting and not simply pawning off our kids attention to entertainment necessary, but I digress, or I’ll circle around again. 5,000 words later: I think the idea of making quiet and contemplation an end, and not simply a means to sanity, a complete perspective changer that rightly orders where and how contemplation functions in our daily lives.

• A beautiful presentation of St. George in art that I enjoyed so much and shared with my kids. Slaying dragons is such a profound metaphor for the human imagination that I think these artists really got. Or at least were formed by a culture that got it.

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reading, watching, what have you:

• the NHL playoffs started this week so that means every other night I need to participate in watching three hours of anxiety inducing hockey with my boys if I’m home. It is so stressful.

• I watched Wes Anderson (Asteroid City was very good!) and Coen brothers (I forgot how great a spiritual movie Hail Caesar! was!) movies on the plane rides, and an exhausted rewatch of When Harry Met Sally which remains such a complicated movie of terrible moral determinations and bad anthropology, but a perfectly written film. And I still know all the dialogue by heart.

• I stopped putting off Tom Holland’s Dominion this week and it is as billed, fantastic. I feel so much smarter already.

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come with me to Ireland!

I know I’ve yammered on about travelling a lot this post, but I would love for you to consider coming on this amazing pilgrimage with me and

Katie Marquette

this October! We are really going to enjoy exploring sacred sites like the Knock Shrine, Craugh Patrick, and Glendalaugh. We also want to enjoy the beauty of the Irish countryside, the Cliffs of Moher, and small Irish villages as well as whiskey tastings, and hanging out in Dublin.

As much as I think this is an incredible experience to further widen and deepen your faith, I really want any trip I take to be a lot of fun, and I one of my goals is for you to have a lot of fun too! This is not going to be a stodgy tour, this is going to be a lot of fun as we immerse ourselves in all things Irish. I really want you to come along.

Here is the brochure for all the details.

And here is a fun video with me and Katie talking about what we’re looking forward to on the trip, and the benefits of travelling with a tour!

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I hope you all have the loveliest weekend! I have a busy one ahead, and I’m going to try to plant out a couple trays of ranunculus this afternoon even though the current temperature is a brisk 5C! Wish me luck.

not a fair weather gardener,

Christy