We flew into Edinburgh and spent our first day there.  What a gorgeous city!  We started our way down the Royal Mile.

Edinburgh Abby

Edinburgh Palace that was the home of Mary Queen of Scots

Lunch on the street - we love the buttered rolls!

Edinburgh Castle.  This place is breathtaking!  It is right on the side of a mountain in the middle of the city - seriously amazing.

Having the time of our lives in Scotland!!  Scotland has been on our To Do list since Nate and I got married, so when Nate’s cousin, Matt, moved there with his wife Tia and their daughter Kalani, we jumped at the chance and invited ourselves over for a visit!  So, what were the best parts about our arrangement in Scotland?  Here goes:

• We got to stay in a house instead of a hotel
• We had our own private tour guides
• Magei had an instant best friend in Kalani
• I had some awesome girl time with Tia
• Nate and Matt got to bask in their computer geekiness
• We got to watch American cable television in the evenings

Obviously I have about a million pictures to post.  Let’s start at the beginning; the house.  Now, the word “house” is a relative term.  Really what we stayed in was a mansion on the most posh street in Aberdeen.  Here’s a peek at our digs:

And what goes better with a mansion than a mile of private woods in the backyard?  Here we are taking a walk on the nature trail in Matt and Tia’s forest after dinner one evening.

We had the best time ever…ten days never went by so fast!  I’m hoping to get our highlights posted over the next few days.

OK, so it’s been over two weeks since Ike passed through Columbus, but I’ve been on vacation so I’m only now getting to this.  According to the weather people, the conditions were just right to produce the hurricane winds as Ike made its way through Kentucky and Ohio.  Governor Strickland declared a state of emergency - Columbus was in a frenzy!  We lost power along with everyone else, and there were some people that were in the dark for over a week.  Fortunately, we left town the day after and didn’t have to deal with it.  Although, Nate and I spent Sunday night packing our suitcases by the romantic glow of candlelight.  I would say the most annoying part of it all was that I had started a load of laundry about 15 minutes before the power went out.  I was left with a washing machine full of water and a huge batch of soaking wet jeans.

Anyway, on to the details:  I had a small mountain of dishes to do by hand.

We lost part of our deck fencing:

We lost a section of our backyard fence:

We lost some tree branches:

 We lost all of our food:

Nate and the kids spent Monday evening raking up the yard:

I find it interesting that when we moved to Ohio over four years ago, we were assured by fellow Ohioans that the weather was actually quite mild.  Oh, contrair….In just our short time here we’ve endured the ice storm of ‘04, the blizzard of the century, and hurricane Ike.  It does leave me wondering what Mother Nature’s got in store for us next.

Saturday was the big day.  Magei has be waiting forever to see Lion King.  Our tickets arrived last year as part of our Broadway season tickets, so it really has been a long wait for her.  We tried to make the day really special for her and have been doing some prep work along the way.  During the week we learned about African animals and looked at picture books about elephants and lions that we checked out from the library.  We have been listening to the broadway soundtrack for a few months now, so she was able to sing along with most of the songs.  There are some really awesome songs that were composed for the broadway production, seperate from the cartoon.  I was thinking that Elton John wrote the entire score, but he was actually responsible for writing the music, while Tim Rice wrote the lyrics.  Nate also got out all of his Africa pictures and told Magei about his trip.

We dropped Sam off at the babysitter and made our way to Cameron’s to have dinner.  So good.  We started off with goat cheese beignets, which were awesome.  Nate ordered the Creole gulf shrimp with goat cheese grits and broccolini.  I had the roasted halibut with procuitto orzo, wilted spinich and lobster butter sauce.  We would definitely get all three dishes again.  Magei was so charming that our server brought her vanilla bean ice cream, compliments of the house - she was in heaven!

We brought a present for Magei to open at the restaurant, which she thought was the coolest thing ever!  The second I saw this elephant purse, I knew Magei would fall in love with it…and I was right.  She hasn’t let it out of her sight since last night.

We made a pit stop at Nate’s 2nd home (the prostodontic lab at OSU) to pick up some work that he had left there earlier in the day.  The mess we’re standing in front of is actually his desk.

Next, we were on to the show.  It was awesome!  Magei declaired it the “bestest”show she has ever seen.  The costumes were amazing, although Nate didn’t like the hyena’s faces.  I would say it was 98% sensational, 2% perplexing.  That 2% is soley based on the “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” sequence.  I found it odd.  And was that a left bum cheek I saw on one of the dancers?  Oddly enough, I read that Garth Fagan (the choreographer) was adamant about the tiered ballet dancers that dominated the scene.  It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I’m not the one with the Tony awards either.  Our favorite parts had to be both opening and closing scenes.  They brought out all the animals for both of these scenes, and the costumes and puppets were incredible.

We had such a wonderful time!  Special thanks to the Howells for watching Sam for 6 whole hours so we could have a special night with Mags!

Nate totally surprised me by coming home to study tonight at 6:15 instead of staying at the school!  I was so happy!  It only took Magei and I about 30 seconds to decide we were going to ditch the boys at home tonight and have a girls night out.

We decided to go see Kit Kittredge even though I have rolled my eyes at every preview I have seen for this show.  I was even contemplating bringing my iPod to watch my own movie if I got bored.  But hello…this turned out to be a good one!  Magei and I both loved it, and it was actually kind of a tear jerker.  I managed to hold them back, but Magei did start crying at one of the sad parts.

I thought it was going to be about some little kid who wanted to be a reporter…and it was, but there was much more going on than that.  I would definitely recommend this movie, especially if you have girls.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s really cute.

OK, and I have to include this picture.  At this point, Sam still thought he was going.  He was so sad that we left without him!

Is it pathetic that I take my kids on field trips to Whole Foods Market?  Whole Foods is my idea of a good time, and if I call it a field trip, they think it’s fun, too.  Doing all my grocery shopping at Whole Foods is out of the questions (hello…$.69 for ONE egg!) but they sell locally grown produce and I love to support local farmers, so I buy what is reasonable.  It’s also the only place I know close to me that you can buy pearl barley and bulgar in the bins. Today I found organic multi-colored sweet corn on the cob that I couldn’t resist.  Considering the fact that when I was a kid and we grew it on our farm (heck, it was probalby even organic since my dad made us weed the fields by hand) and sold it 13 for $1 it was a rip-off…but, I think that about any corn on the cob I buy in the grocery store.  The kids and I ground our own peanut butter and for a little extra excitement we added chocolate chips.  It turned out really good.  They also had capricho de cabra (a kind of cheese…we love, love, love cheese in this house) that Magei and I couldn’t resist…However, at $13 a pound, I only got 2 ounces.  Our greatest find of the day was these:

These are sunflower seeds M&M style.  I’m actually not a big fan of M&Ms because it is too much semi-sweet chocolate for my liking, but these have the smallest amount of chocolate coated around a sunflower seed.  Seriously, these are so so good.  I even let Sam eat a handful that he dropped on the kitchen floor so they didn’t go to waste.  I will definately be buying these again soon.