Holiday.

Holiday.

Oliver and I leave first thing in the morning for England. We'll be back in early August. Erik will follow us on Sunday. We're going with my family, to visit more of my family and attend my cousin's wedding.

Four bags. Plus a carseat. Plus an umbrella stroller. Plus a Beco carrier. And that's just for Ollie and I. One suitcase is entirely diapers. On that note, tomorrow morning will officially break Ollie's streak of being exclusively cloth diapered. *tiny violins*. It's going to be several days before we arrive at the cottage in the Lake District (with washer! and dryer!), so there's absolutely no way we could deal with cloth in the mean time. Well, of course there's a way, but for the love of pete.

We're staying in Cockermouth, the delightful birth place of William Wordsworth and home to a killer vegetarian restaurant. Cockermouth is just inside of the actual lake-y Lake District, as opposed to the coastal developed parts where I grew up. Not that it's at all far away. But 20 miles is a long 20 miles on those roads.

I'm really looking forward to it. It has been a long, long time since I've taken a vacation without worrying about my work load (or even homework load) when I return, or that my coworkers were discovering my absolute lack of organization in my office files, or maybe someone tapped into my internet history. It's going to be very nice. Very nice.

I can't wait to see Oliver run around in the beautiful wild places, the Peter Rabbit landscapes, the secret river banks, the vast tree-flanked lakes, the vibrant green sloped rocky fells (peppered charmingly with "sheep balls," as we so fondly used to refer to sheep poop). I can't wait to take him to Thornhill to walk down our old dirt road past the abandoned railroad and through the fields to the beck. I remember we used to pick wildflowers and tiptoe past cow poo to try to get the cows to smell our little grubby bouquets (they were rarely interested). Maybe we'll just watch the cows from afar instead. "MMMMM"s, as Ollie knows them.

Sign. I'm going home. Or as the cumbrians would say: As ga'an yam.