Babysitting in Britain: A Test Run (Emily this is for you!)

I got to babysit today!! (yes! my calling in life!)

How it happened is this.  There is a couple here at Cambridge who brought their 20 month old son with them to England. The mom is also pregnant. It hardly bares stating aloud that this couple is from BYU. Anyway, the parents are nice and I feel bad for them because it's really hard for both of them to be going to school in a foreign country with a kid. I mean its difficult to have a kid whatever the environment. But when you are at a fancy pants institution its especially difficult not to mention rather gauche.

So I volunteered to babysit for them a little bit. I mean,  I don't actually know them but if either of my wonderful sisters were in this situation I would be helping them out however I could. Plus, considering the path I'm steering my life on right now there is an overwhelming chance that one day I will be toting a kid or two of my own around in some foreign country. So I thought I might as well pay it forward. And, lets be honest, I really love kids.

This little boy's name is Anson and he is adorable. I only had him for a couple hours so we just walked around a bit, went to the playground in the park and had lunch. I really freaked out my War and Security professor when I ran into her on the street pushing a stroller. She totally would have passed me by but I said hi and she stopped, took off her sunglasses and just looked at me. I explained that I was in her class and quickly added that the baby wasn't mine and she was like "ohhhhhh, sorry. I just don't expect one of the students to have a child." Yeah, that's a pretty safe assumption most of the time.

The playground was really fun and Anson and I had fun playing on the slide and the obstacle course. When it was time to go to lunch, I took him into the King's College dining hall and felt extremely conspicous as all the women workers in the place zoned in on Anson and started saying how cute he was and asking how he broke his arm (apparently he fell off a chair awhile ago...?)

Anyway, props to all you moms out there because it was not an easy couple of hours. And lunch, the most mundane activity was probably the hardest. I had a tray piled with food, a stroller and a baby. It was quite difficult to maneuver and, as I mentioned before, extremely conspicous. After I dropped him off with his mom at 1 I felt so free. It was like "wow, I can walk on the sidewalk and then step down into the street for a second and then jump the gutter and be on the sidewalk again?" (the narrow cobbled street made the stroller difficult).

Handsome Anson

he does well for a kid with only one functioning arm

me and my replacement Milo
(just kidding Emily!!)

Ducky...quack  quack!

But yeah. To all you mums out there (EMILY and LAURA!) It is definitely very doable to bring your kid to England (I mean England itself is a very easy place to live) but it would not be hard to raise a kid here (so basically we should all move to Britain!) The people in the town and at the playground were really nice and I don't think it would really be any harder to live here than where you guys live right now --except of course that you don't know anyone yet.

Anyway,  seeing as I would really love to move to Europe and raise a family here I thought it was a good little test run and I'm sure I will be babysitting Anson a bit more while I am here.

The other thing I did today was walk with some of the other PKP students to Granchester for tea by which I mean scones. Apparently a lot of really famous writers used to go there. It was very picturesque and I had fun.

A quaint English house we passed on our way to Granchester

I love red doors!

It was hard to get lost when we had such faithful trail markers

When in doubt, pinky out!

tea at Granchester! 

The secret life of bees
(actually the bees were jammed in there--get it "jammed"?!?--because they were stuck in the remaining jam in the jar and then someone closed the cap over them and they couldn't get out. Poor guys. I thought about rescuing them but didn't want to get stung.)

this is England

I like the little European cars

So I'm sure many of you are thinking, "this is great, but when on earth does she do homework?" That's a very good question and I've been asking myself that lately. I mean to be fair I did spend about 7 or 8 hours in the library yesterday but it didn't really feel like work. I mean I'm working on a novel the same thing I would be doing if I was at home. And then I'm doing super interesting reading on security and international development. It's awesome. But I really should be doing a bit more. So with that I will sign off and hopefully force myself to do some writing.