February and March in a Nutshell

After our trip to Paris nothing exciting happened in our lives in January. Around here you kind of just hunker down and get through the dark months of winter. They are known as the dark months because it is literally dark. The sun rises at 8am and sets at 3pm. Talk about feeling weird when  its already dark outside and you are putting kids on a school bus at 4pm to head home after their after school activities. It is also normally pretty darn cold, but this winter wasn’t too bad. I think it pretty much stayed in the lower 50s and upper 40s. I only had to scrape my car once! So moving on the best month, my birthday month, February. We kicked the month off taking separate trips. Sam went to Bruges, Belgium for a beer festival with the guys and I went to Reims, France to tour the champagne houses with the ladies. I don’t have any pictures of Sam’s adventures because guys don’t take pictures, but we all had a good time and I enjoyed champagne land, though I still don’t care for champagne it is cool to say I have been there.

Touring Champagne Houses

Tasting Champagne

Over the long weekend in February, I believe that would’ve been presidents day, Sam and I decided to take a weekend trip up to York. We invited Rachel and Josh to join us because we heard York was beautiful and worth a weekend visit. Sam left for a one day TDY (stands for temporary duty assignment) and he ended up not being able to come home for close to two weeks. I said we had a mild winter here but the winds were crazy on multiple occasions. This weekend in particular and Sam couldn’t get back to England because the winds were out of limits for the plane to land. If I can hear the winds then they must be out of limits. Anyway, we pushed back our York trip and Rachel, Josh and I visited a farm first while we waited to see if Sam would make it home.

 

We got up the next morning and decided to go on to York. Making that hard decision of moving on with your life plans when your military member was really looking forward to it is the toughest part of this job. I am glad we went though and I will go back with Sam one day. We took a walking tour of the city and we even took a ghost tour. It was so much fun and the city was beautiful. We spent two days in York and it was worth it. We were all sad that Sam couldn’t be with us, but that is the life of the military and Rachel and Josh got to experience a taste of being a military spouse, when you get that email that says, “Coming home today” only to get another one an hour later that says, “Never mind, not today.” It was a good weekend anyway and Sam was able to get home and spend a few weeks home before taking off again so it was a win, win for everyone. 

Pretending Sam is with me

A delicious dinner! 

We had a very special birthday in February (aside from mine and my FIL). Eleanor turned one year old! It seems like only yesterday I was holding her in the hospital. Now they have moved on to their next assignment and are stationed in Washington State, we miss you so much Murphy’s! They are part of our Bible study family, again something we were so blessed to have gotten plugged into at the very beginning. We celebrated with a birthday party at Angela’s house which will forever be known as the time we all shared the flu epidemic. After spending this evening together over half the people came down with the stomach bug the next few days, it was rough but hey it makes us a real family. Also, this is the last time everyone was actually together. Since February someone (mostly on the guy side) has been gone every time we get together for Bible study. Someday I believe we will be able to recreate this picture with everyone together but that might be a long time from now, especially since we don’t all live in England, but it will happen.

February is an awesome month, but a short month, always seems to fly by quickly! Before I knew it I was turning 25. For my birthday one of my friends, Taryn, threw a birthday party for me at her house. We did a painting party and Taryn provided the canvases, paint, food and delicious cake. It was so very sweet of her and I felt very loved by the number of my friends here who came to celebrate with me. Thank you all, again, for coming! We had a blast and there are some creative ladies in the group. I have said it before but I will say it again, I am very blessed to have made such wonderful friends and support group here. However, looking at these pictures make me sad because there are some very special women, whom I admire greatly, that has moved away or is getting ready to move away.  That is the not so great part of this life, saying goodbye to those great friends that you have met knowing we still have awhile yet before we leave. Thankfully, there is Facebook and I can keep up with them and their little ones.

Best group of women ever

They are all artistic too!

 
February ended with a bang and plenty of pretty pictures. Suddenly it was March! Since Rachel and Josh didn’t get to see Sam in York we went to London the weekend before he left for another deployment. It was Sam’s last time to visit their flat as they have also moved back to the states and they made the move before Sam came home from deployment. We went and toured a beautiful estate home in London. I don’t remember all of the history but it had beautiful wall paintings and ceiling detail like most of these types of homes. We had a great time and we even ate at my favorite place in Islington, La Divina. It was a great weekend, bitter sweet as it was the last time the Bairbrooks would on UK soil together. It was such a blessing to share the experience of living overseas with Rachel and Josh for a year and a half. It is so much fun to travel with them and have travel partners and we miss them terribly. We also miss our city flat and I will especially miss having a girl’s weekend with Rachel when Sam deploys again later this summer, but we cherish every moment and memory we made with them while living together in England!

I love this picture

 As I said Sam left at the beginning of March. I did have a girl’s spa weekend with some of the ladies from here where we spent the weekend at a hotel getting pampered. Then Rachel came to visit me and we had a three hour lunch in the sun at La Hogue, mowed my grass and she pruned our apple tree. Then after that March was over and it was April which brought a spring break trip to Spain and visitors from America. After that was May which brought a new job for me and Sam’s homecoming for about 9 days until he left again, but we will save all of that for another blog post…or two! I managed to stay very busy this last deployment and that really helped me.

I took Hercules to Wrest Park on the first weekend Sam was away

A beautiful weekend with Rachel

Thanks for reading!
Amanda