I check on my littlest one before I go to sleep.

Her hand is steady. She’s been in bed for three hours now – enough time for her little body to settle into its sleep rhythms and breath patterns, into its own warmth it will keep during the night.

Her hand is warm – not the sweaty fidgeting of falling into sleep, or the cool skin in the early hours of the morning when the light seeps through her shutters. But the comfortable, safe warmth her body lives in in the middle of the night as she sleeps.

(I thank God that I can keep my children warm at night. Under familiar blankets. In smooth beds. With fresh scents and clean sheets. I thank God I can bathe them in the evening and place them on their pillows with damp hair.)

I check on them. Before I can sleep, long after they’ve closed their eyes, I need to check.

Maybe it is that promise I need to keep. To them. Or too myself. I’ll check on you…

Or maybe it’s seeing that she is safe before I can give my own mind over to rest.

Maybe it is simply checking that her hand has reached its warmth – that she is under her blanket (the fuzzy side, not the silky side) – and that her dreams seem peaceful to me looking in. Her blondish curl is stuck to her forehead and she turns and lets out a sleep sigh. It is long and drawn as if she is too caught in sleep to stop her little voice. I put my two fingers in her palm and she immediately, slowly, curls around me. She grabs my hand and loves me, even in her sleep.

Maybe this is why I check on her. Selfishly so, to feel her love for me before I go to my own bed.

(Originally publishes on May 23, 2008 as “Checking“)

We spent our last afternoon here at the Orchard Tea House in Grantchester.

For me, Monday will start at 3:45 am.

But 3:45 am here in the UK. We’ll be taken to the coach stop at 4:30 to catch the 5:00 am bus to Heathrow. That’s a three and a half hour drive.

Then we’ll board the plane at 10:15 in the morning, take off by 11 (if we’re lucky) and then spend 11 hours on board. Somewhere aroud 10 pm our time (3 pm local time) we’ll land in Los Angeles.

And then we’ll try to keep everyone up as late as possible to get a head start on returning to the Pacific time zone.

Don’t call me on Tuesday. I will be in a constant dream state.

But for Sunday, we’ll take one last excursion to Granchester near Cambridge with the group of nine that has been our constant family for the last 11 days:

• Tiffany: sister-in-law and mother extraordinaire. homeschooler, children’s ministry coodinator, and maker of an amazing cup of Yorkshire tea.
• Joey: brother-in-law and pastor. teller of stories, friend of everyone and purchaser of convienience store flapjacks (like brownies, sort-of)
• Madelyn: age 8, beautiful, quiet, and lover of all things related to ballet, princess gowns, and gardens of flowers. can switch in and out of an English accent depending on who she’s talking to.
• Josiah: age 5, loud with laughter and the image of my own husband at the same age in appearance and action. can also switch accents without thinking.
• Jordan: 22 months, happy, hungry and the one who can’t stand to be left out of anyone’s playtime. Love’s to touch everyone’s ears. I know. Cute, huh?
• Chad: my husband and consumer of his new find, salt and pepper bread. needs more sleep and alone time after this week.
• Hope: age 7, mine, admirer of her older cousin, sensitive and would sleep on the floor of her cousin’s room for the rest of her life if I’d let her.
• Naomi: age 3, also mine. mixes in well with both the older and younger, until her younger cousin antagonizes her for no reason at all. was enthralled with the “castle church”.
• And me: I’m known here but you may not know that I’m currently a driver on the left side of the road and don’t know how I’m going to switch back. I am addicted to sleeved biscuits here called “Digestives” by McVities. Believe me, they aren’t as wholesome as they sound. And I never did get down to London. But I’m alright with that. I did span 4000 years of artifacts in 12 hours on Thursday.

So, think of me Monday when I take two spent children and one exhausted husband on the longest day of their lives. We’ll be home soon. And I’m very glad.

England is an island.

And a relatively small one too. We did more traveling on Thursday around the island than most English people ever to. We drove a little over 300 miles and we covered a LOT.

Someone I spoke to on Friday night asked about our holiday week, what we had done, what we had seen. I told him about our prehistoric/medieval marathon tour on Thursday.

He said, “England is small. But here, its all in the details.”

And he’s right.

The beauty of England is not the vastness of the American plain states or the largess of an Alaskan glacier. It is the Gothic detail on Ely Cathedral and the tulips poking through, almost past their prime in all the neighborhood gardens.

The gates to Kings College in Cambridge, the spiral steps up a medieval tower, the eagle flying to the arm of a falconer: details. The glass of cider at the pub, the daffodils on the bank of the Cam, and the hidden bridge in the country park, the herbs for sale at the market: details. The purple-pink seeping through the stained glass this morning, the intense greenness of spring grass and the fields of yellow flowers across the street at the farm.

And most of it is actually being able to see the details. Its about not speeding by too quickly in a car or motor coach and missing it all. Its about not worrying about the kids fighting with each other so that it robs me of the beauty I’m walking by.

Noticing.

I’m working on it.

In the morning it was wind.

Thursday we took just our two girls, loaded up the rental Prius (said “PRY-us” here) and headed south toward Stonehenge. Because of traffic on the north edge of London, it took us 3 1/2 hours to get there. I think we could have made it all the way to Cardiff in that same amount of time.

We made it to the Salisbury plain and it was actually a little sunny. “Sunny” here in April means that the sun tried really hard to break through the clouds. We felt blessed because at least it wasn’t raining.

Hope listened to the audio tour the whole time and later could even recite why Stonehenge is named Stonehenge. The best learning takes place out of doors, I’m convinced.

By then the wind had kicked up across the downs, and although it wasn’t raining yet, it was very cold. We stopped for homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the “druid” near the entrance who was calling for petition signers to restore Stonehenge to its original environment on the plain (essentially, get rid of the roads and people).

Northbound, toward the city of Warwick, it began to rain. Hard. Not like silly California rain. We drove through Oxford but being that the visibility was zero, it could have been Alaska or Seattle for all I knew.

Californians don’t own Wellies (rainboots) because we don’t have a need for them. So when my sister-in-law a few weeks ago told me to bring our boots, I probably should have gone out to purchase them. I. Had. No. Idea. how wet my feet would get this week.

I’ve been soggy for 8 days.

Warwick castle (minus the creepy million step spiral staircase up and down in the towers) was amazing. We watched a falconer tame a bald eagle and I paid 3 pounds for Hope to shoot some real arrows. We walked through the halls and learned how people would have lived in Tudor times, the 18th and 19th centuries. The dry, warm insides of the castle (only warm now in 2009 because of forced air heating) were prefered to the wet, slippery courtyard.

We left Elizabethan England and headed to the McDonalds on the motorway toward home. Although a 14 course Tudor-style feast would have helped the girl’s empty tummies, the chicken nuggets and milk boxes were just fine.

I haven’t done much running since I’ve been in England.

The first 2-3 days I was still recovering from a night without sleep and waking up in the morning 8 hours earlier than I’m used to.

And then I got sick.

I did manage two different jog/walks in there before I got too bad, but by Thursday afternoon, I felt like my head was squeezed between two of the Sarsen stones at Stonehenge. I tried to tell myself it was just spring allergies and that I was sneezing because of the acres and acres of flowers in bloom. And then I began to cough. So I’m sick.

I’ve felt a little less than normal everyday since I got on the plane in LA last week.

And through it all my sister-in-law has been amazing.

I haven’t been helping much with the cooking or laundry or dish washing. Nine people can produce a lot of dirty dishes and muddy socks. When we got back from our day trip yesterday (I’ll post pictures of Stonehenge and Warwick Castle later), she had washed and changed our sheets, folded our clothes and cleaned the house.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel more up to running or washing the dishes, but until then I’ll just thank Tiffany for taking care of me.

Today we took the girls into downtown Cambridge for the afternoon.

Our trip to Mountfitchet Castle in Essex this afternoon was enlightening.

It was a sort of Ripley’s Believe it Not Wax Museum set on a true historical spot with bits of the real Norman wall peeking through from beneath the thatch huts built in the 1960s. Half museum/ half eleventh century village, our kids wouldn’t have had any better time at a real fairytale castle.

“Where’s the castle?” They kept asking as they darted into the museum huts with various scenes from Norman life (including a baron’s house and hall, a church, a bathing hut and a “discipline” hut complete with torture chamber).

This is the castle. Apparently in 1066, a village with a wooden wall around it built on the top of a hill is a castle.

The kids ran, chased the ducks, learned (on accident) what happens when someone stole something (hence the fake chopping off of the hand in the “discipline” hut), and played “castle” in one of the siege towers.

I learned a lot too about family rearing in 1066 ad:

1. When your sister would like to hit you on the head with a wooden club, wear chain mail. It might get caught in your braids but your head will be protected.
2. Be careful not to anger your parents or you might find yourself in stocks, or worse.
3. Be careful not to anger your children or you might find yourself in stocks.
4. Be thankful for indoor plumbing.
5. There are ways around infertility.Joking aside, we had such a good time. But don’t get me started about the toy museum connected to it.

While you all are still sleeping, we’ll be visiting a castle today. (But then when I’m sleeping tonight, you will be having lunch and dinner…)

Meanwhile, I have a series going over at Our Creative Community about my writers conference. Go on over and have a look!

I’ll be posting later about our afternoon excursion!