Sunday: Must Be Time For Church

Our plan had been to attend services at our parish church of St. Paul's Hammersmith this morning, but sometimes the best laid plans don't quite work out. Saturday night, all three girls, having gone to bed at 9, awakened at 1 and didn't go back to sleep until 5, a not unusual by highly disruptive part of reacclimation to a new time zone. As a result, everyone overslept Sunday morning. We turned disaster into opportunity, however, by rearranging our plans and attending mass at the Brompton Oratory adjacent to the Natural History Museum. The Brompton Oratorio is one of the most ornate catholic churches in London and is renowed both for the quality of the music and the use of the Latin mass. The girls were exposed to both as well as to the beautiful architecture. Later in the day, once we were back in schedule, we visited Southwark Cathedral near London Bridge for an Anglican evensong. One of the highlights of the day occurred as were walking toward the cathedral only to hear Cecily yelling, "Wait! Wait." We turned around to find our youngest daughter with her overly loose pants down around her ankles in the middle of the street, having simply fallen off her hips. Once Cec got her pants back on we continued to the cathedral where you could visibly see the look of alarm on the faces of the clerics when we walked in with three little girls to attend this event with its focus on quiet reflection, but afterwards all of the clerics approached us afterwards to compliment the "extraordinary behavior of the children" as they put it. After all that in a single day, no one had any problem sleeping through the night.