Today Emily and Nathan had their first ever ride in the front seat of the 2nd level of a doubledecker bus.  Today they also got to experience their first day of great London weather as it was much cooler and breezy.

The day started with Emily cooking sausages and pancakes. She did a great job.  Once breakfast was over we headed out to the bus stop to head for a day in Hyde Park.  They both loved sitting high and watching directly onto the road. Emily said “This is wonderful”  Nathan was busy instructing pedestrian and drivers yelling things like “C’mon lady! What are you doing? Get out of the way!”

We had a long walk in Hyde Park which actually was too long for some of our little feet participants (Nathan and Nancy).  The park is currently very brown since until last night, it hadn’t rained in England since 1967.

The kids enjoyed the serpentine especially being able to get close enough to pigeons to require all of us to constantly yell “Don’t touch that pigeon!”

Christo was here.

We stopped to let the kids run around in the Diana Memorial Fountain and then went to the Diana Memorial Playground.  Emily climbed to the top of the pirate ship and seemed to be stuck there because there was room for one kid to go up or down at a time.  Later she played a game on a wooden boat with a boy about her age trying to see who could seriously injure the other first by yanking on a chain to tilt the boat toward the opponent.

Laura and Braden stopped for lunch at a Lebanese place, but we took the kids to an exotic new restaurant called McDonalds.

After lunch we walked down a street called Kensington Gardens which is the home to a bunch of embassies such as, Russia, Finland, Saudi Arabia, and Romania.  I may try to include some drawings from that street in this post because photography is prohibited.

Kensington  Palace was next on the list.  We walked around and took pictures but the kids were disappointed because we found out that Bill and Kate were on vacation and that meant no play date with George, Charlotte and Louis.

We took a walk on the flower walk and rested at the Albert Memorial before taking a bus to Harrod’s, getting Nathan a minion, and then bussing home for Braden’s specialty dinner of hot dogs and beans.