England 1: Departures and Arrivals

I have been terribly remiss this summer in keeping the blog up to date. Life is always so full! Perhaps I'll go back at some point and do a June and July retrospective. At present, though, I'm hoping to getting up some documentation of our current travels in England... 

Hard to believe, but it's been 3+ years since our last visit here to southern England, where Mom grew up and where her family still resides. We drove to Newark, NJ on Monday, August 1 and in due time arrived in London's Heathrow airport, Tuesday morning. The boys were absolutely perfect for the hours and hours of driving...waiting...flying...more waiting...more driving... Jesse was capable as ever in immediately piloting our rented 5-speed little Fiat Punto (on practically no sleep) through the highways, byways, and roundabouts from the airport to Colehill in Dorset.

Josiah loved every minute of the journey!

We had been pretty concerned about how the travel would go with the boys, especially for William -- who's prone to ugly fits and anger at times. We were definitely relieved to make the journey safely and happily! What we didn't expect was what happened next. Within two hours of arriving at Colin and Ann's, Josiah took a nasty fall off of a bike. Ann whisked Jesse and Josiah to Poole Hospital, and soon he underwent a nearly 2-hour surgery to have the upper bone in his right arm set and wires inserted; a triangle shaped piece of bone near the elbow basically came off. It was a bad break.

I was anxiously waiting at home for about 18 hours with only one quick call from Jesse when Josiah first went into surgery on Tuesday evening. By all accounts, though, Josiah was a real trooper once he got some morphine to kill the pain. Apparently he was asked by a few nurses, "Are all the chaps in America as brave as you?" :) He was kept in hospital until early Wednesday afternoon.

It definitely was a rough start to our trip, but we felt so blessed that Josiah got wonderful care, that we're staying with gracious family and could take it easy for a few days, and that our vacation here was scheduled to be two and a half weeks long, meaning that a few bad days weren't going to spoil the entire trip.

William and I had a lot of quality time together while we waited for word from Daddy about big brother. 

My first glimpse of my brave boy in hospital on Wednesday at discharge time. He was pretty wobbly for a day or so, but a new teddy from the hospital staff did him a world of good! 

Even trains didn't do much to pick him up when we first got home...