May you know God's peace

"A foggy day in London town..."

On our way into London :) We had a really great day! Pretty much everything was a blessing, we found lots of things in London that we weren't even looking for and everything we were looking for as well. I wish I could describe what an awesome day this was, I am still smiling.

The ice skating rink in front of The Natural History Museum, it was so much fun. I don't have any pics of us on the ice (because you can't take camera's in) but we had a blast, especially since neither of us fell.

(Below) I love the hummingbird bakery cook book, so I was really excited when we stumbled across the actual bakery! They have some really yummy stuff.

Ok, you will need to control your excitement, I know it will be hard but you just have to wait...

Ahhhhhhh!!! We are SO excited, can you believe your eyes? We almost can't...but we do. They are opening up Chipotle's first international Chipotle in London! Oh we'll be back! It opens in April...it's almost cruel to have us wait that long, but I am willing to let it slide for that goodness. I was and still am seriously giddy, eeek our "own" Chipotle only an hour away. Hmmm April, I wonder what we'll be doing on Alan's birthday?

They are also looking for more locations in London, and they eventually want to open stores in Paris and other parts of Europe...after all no place should be deprived of this stuff.

Love you all, Happy Christmas Eve! (It is technically Christmas Eve here :)

I still can't believe where we live!

Just after taking this picture it started snowing! It didn't stick, but it was pretty while it was falling. We are suppose to get more snow this week!!! :-)

A few pictures from today

Just Fun

These are just some funny pictures we took recently. Man do you see my hair! I may like England but my hair is taking a while to come around. It get so fluffy on rainy days, which apparently is quite often :)

"over the fields we go, laughing all the way!"

We put up our Christmas tree on December 1st, these are just a couple pics from that night. I think I just have one more thing to buy and I will be all done! I will try to get some pics of downtown Oxford up soon, the lights down there look great and the street performers are out in full force. Hope everyone is enjoying their December, we sure are :)

Bye Buddy

My mom and sister should be landing right about now at LAX. Here are just a couple of pics from their trip.

I hope you guys had a decent flight home and recoup quickly! Love ya.

(And just so everyone knows 25 days until Christmas!!!)

Just Thankful

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun! I think the food tastes better when you actually do the cooking. This was my first year cooking and hosting for thanksgiving. I made that sweet pie from scratch! I am not a huge pie fan but that was freaking good ;) Alan said it was the best pie he had ever had...but he may be biased. The fact that I served it to him warm and with a scoop of ice cream may have swayed him as well. The little things on top are suppose to be Christmas trees. It was also my first time cooking a turkey, and that turned out yummy too. (See pictures below)
My sister is thankful for PJ's. She wore them all day! We watched Christmas movies all day and cooked, so she just stayed comfortable. Funny how different we are, I would rather look all cute and she is just chill and like pshhh I'll stay in my pajama's. This time last year she was sick on Thanksgiving and little did we know that she was getting very very sick. I am thankful that she isn't sick anymore! I love this girl.

I think it may be a problem! I obviously know how to spell thanksgiving...but for some reason I rush ahead on holidays. We made "our first Christmas" ornament a couple of years ago and I spelled Christmas wrong on it too (No "t"). My family especially a 16 year old who shall remain unnamed thinks it hilarious.

Meet Frank...my first turkey. He was a yummy turkey! I usually don't like thanksgiving food that much, but this year was fun. I like cooking, I think this made me like the food better. I brined this turkey! I did some turkey research and made up my own recipe for the brine. Oh the wonders of wiki how. It actually made a huge difference though. There wasn't a dry piece on him. (Oh yeah I know you like my morning hair, ehhh?)

This is him all cooked and ready to go. Of course my first thanksgiving couldn't be without a hiccup. So.... do you see it? behind the orange bowl? It is the sweet potatoes, you know the kind with marshmallows on top? Well apparently marshmallows don't like fan ovens (do you have those in the US?) or something because the marshmallows exploded all over my oven! Luckily they were the last thing I was heating up so I didn't need to cook anything else in my marshmallow oven.

OK here's the Thankful list!

• I am thankful for being saved!!! First and foremost.
• I really am thankful for this sanctification process even though it really hurts sometimes.
• I am so thankful for Alan, that I have a wonderful husband who loves the Lord and it shows.
• I am thankful for our families
• I am thankful for my friends new ones in Oxford, and old ones in America. I miss you guys so much!
• I am thankful for our phone! So I can talk to those old friends! (also facebook, skype, and email)
• I am thankful it's Christmas time!!!
• ....and I am thankful that I have to die to myself in order to live for Him!

It's the little things

It seems like they have a lot more kinds of cheese here, but one thing I hadn't seen was monterey jack cheese, which I think is oh so yummy! Today they had one bag of it at our grocery store so I snatched it up and am trying to decide how to use it best.

...stay tuned for pictures of Frank, my first turkey :)

The Rideout girls have come to town!

We had a really fun day of walking around Oxford and trying to give them as much history as we know. We shared our favorite place to eat with them for lunch. Can you guess why we like it so much? It reminds us of some other place we know of.

It is SO yummy!

I have missed her so!

My mom is Santa, or at least one of his helpers.

My mom brought a whole suitcase full of fun presents!!! We felt so loved and were very blessed! Alan got hooked up with the mac n cheese and he's already had a batch.

Hallie used chipotle bags to wrap our presents :)

Look at this bag of Swedish Fish!!! I will be set for a while! This is our suitcase o' presents. Thanks so much everyone for all the gifts it was such a blessing, I can't thank you enough!

Christmas in a cup!

The suspense is over!!! English Starbucks have red cups and my favorite holiday drink :) I had to explain how to make it, but it was delicious! Ahhh the holidays can begin now.

It has to be chronological!!!

I am sorry I know you must be expecting pictures of my mum and sister visiting and don't get me wrong I have got them, but I have to keep it chronological. Stay tuned for future blogs soon about their visit. I won't let it be so long in between posts.

I started my new job about 3 weeks ago and on my first day this was waiting for me when I got home :) My oh so wonderful husband made a yummy dinner for us. I am so blessed to be his wife!

I am working at an after school program. One day I made pretzels with the kids and of course we needed to make sure they worked!!! ;) This is the result, I think Alan kinda showed me up! That is an XBOX controller. These were pretty yummy as well and super easy to make.

Oh my precious....(jk)

We got our things from America last week too! I am so happy. It is so great to have some things around that make our apt feel even more like home. They also had my precious crate and barrel things :) :) :) None of it broke either I was really excited. Oh all the boxes are opened because we had to look through them while the delivery guys were still there to report anything missing or broken. Well I just wanted you all to share my excitement!!!

Stonehenge

Turns out these little babies are only like an hour away from us...who knew. We had a fun little excursion last week. There is nothing around them though, they are in the middle of fields and hills. They are pretty impressive to see though.

St Giles Fair

It is a really fun week to be in Oxford first we have the St Giles fair. The city closes one of the main streets downtown for this fair. It was fun to just go and walk around and get some cotton candy (which they call candy floss here). Alan got a hot dog and was so excited for it! They don't really have hot dogs.

Then this up coming weekend is Oxford Open Doors. It is a two day event where the city "opens it's doors" for free (free being the reason I am excited). We have our whole weekend planned out, going around visiting all the oxford sites that we have yet to see. We are most excited to go into some of the university buildings that aren't usually even open to the public. I am sure I will have more pictures from that.

On another note, please be praying for the youth outreach coming up. We have to get approved by the police to have it. One of the steps in this process is a british background check but the company that does them is saying that we haven't been in the UK long enough to have one. So we are trying to work all of that out. Pray that it all gets sorted and that we can get this out reach going :) Also we have a praise that we have a venue to have it in, which is an answered prayer.

Getting Lost...Priceless

From the adventures of the Berthiaume's...

Can you tell?

Could you tell that this is me! I looked so different as a baby. I just spent like two hours scanning old pictures into our computer. We had to stay up really late because we were skyping with one of the Wednesday night classes at Grace Chapel. It didn't start until 3am our time. So I had some time to kill and had been wanting to scan them.

Maybe I thought Princesses put their hands up like this??? I also downloaded some pictures we have of Alan I will post them another time, I am not sure you can take cuteness of that magnitude yet.

BBQ

Here is a quick little pic from our church BBQ (photo credit Dave Baxter)

Our Church

Ok so this picture might be a little ghetto. I have been carrying around our little point and shoot to try and remember to take pictures of our everyday lives. (See how dedicated I am to you guys?) This is our church...well most of the time it's our local primary school. But on Sunday mornings it's Calvary Chapel Oxford :) We meet in the left side, where the auditorium is, and then the youth meet in a double classroom.

For the love of cheese!

The Clarks brought Alan over some Kraft Mac N Cheese, we can get mostly everything here except this. The English Mac N Cheese is canned, not so edible. (Not that I like any synthetic mac n cheese). Alan is so thankful for this Cathy. A little bit of "home" in a pouch. We loved visiting with you guys!

The food here is different but not bad at all. I can mostly find things here that are the same or compatible with what I cook the most. I have been branching out, usually a good thing. They measure their food a little differently. They use ml instead of tsp and they weigh their food instead of using cups. We have been pretty pleased with the food here, now all we need is a Chipotle. Do you think that can be fed ex'ed?