wow, the past few weeks have been so wild! the christmas crazy combined with lots of other stuff going in our family – it’s been a whirlwind! life feels full, full, full right now. i am both grateful and exhausted.

at the very beginning of december, we took a little christmassy road trip to some places in england we had heard do this time of year really well. we visited the christmas markets in bath and enjoyed the festivity and lights at waddesdon manor and blenheim palace. on the way home we stopped at an awesome christmas tree farm and picked out a tree to tie on to the top of our rental car and bring home to our flat! we stayed one night at the most charming, lovely country cottage and another night at the most random, tiny airbnb that was just a couple of rooms in a family home. we had a good time and enjoyed all the christmassy-ness, but it was a pretty chaotic trip. our kids must be really hyped up on the holiday cheer because they have been so wild (and whiney!) lately … and there was also a good dousing of rain and some instances of being hangry 😉 i didn’t get very many pictures because there was a lot of wrangling of little boys to be done … but here’s a few snapshots!

bath is pretty magical to start out with. add lots of twinkly lights and pretty market stalls and it’s quite spectacular. (although, we agreed that once you’ve been to german christmas markets nothing else measures up!)
 
 
a good chunk of our evening in bath looked like the picture on the left below (whiney three year old!) but the ten minutes the boys and i spent inside a snowglobe were quite redeeming 🙂

next stop the next morning: waddesdon manor … in the rain!

^^ i really love that moses, gabriel and i all having matching hats! while ian was snapping this picture of us, it started pouring! ^^
 
we did our best to enjoy the gardens – strung with all kinds of christmas displays – and the really cool playground in the wet conditions! luckily i had an extra pair of clothes handy for both boys – there were a few puddle mishaps, haha. there was also a gorgeous sunset (and moonrise), and we watched as cool light projections danced on the building for a few songs before heading to our next destination.

the light trail at blenheim palace was really impressive, and fun for all of us. moses and daddy swapped hats and the boys traded off in the stroller and we all tried to stay warm!
 
the highlight of the entire trip for sure was the rides we did – two carousels and a helter-skelter – before leaving blenheim palace. the boys were sooooo excited and full of joy.
 

since moving to london, we have made it a tradition to do a christmassy trip each december. we did our big german (and austrian and swiss) christmas markets trip our first year, went to magical copenhagen with baby moses, were enchanted by brussels and bruge in 2017, and freezed our butts off in cologne (germany) last year. next year i’m thinking strasbourg and colmar (france)!