the pictures are here!!!

I've posted them on Shutterfly. You can access the slideshow by clicking HERE. (This is a satellite snapshot of Cambridge UK, courtesy of GoogleEarth, by the way.)

You'll definitely want to come back to the blog for the next couple of weeks, though, as I'll be posting the accompanying stories daily.

Today's Tale: Good Manners are All Relative

The first week, we stayed in Cambridge at a hotel, so we ate out every night for dinner, and the kids had room service every morning for breakfast (okay, it was just corn flakes, but still!). Anyway, we've always been very adamant about them saying "please" and "thank you," especially when we go out, and maybe because they were on vacation, too, they were especially grateful to everyone -- for every thing -- at every possible moment.

So, we're not sure if it's a cultural thing or not, but we didn't seem to get a lot of "you're welcomes" while we were there. And our kids tend to...well...be VERY persistent if they're not acknowledged right away. So these poor waiters just got "thank you'd" to death. Every time they brought some water...or napkins...or menus...or happened to walk by...or breathed in our direction. And because they never said "you're welcome", the kids just kept at it. Over and over. Like a cult. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The Order of the Obsessively Grateful Children. It was a little creepy, to tell you the truth. So, Mommy and I had to do a lot of intervening, give "you're welcomes" when they were due, and somehow try to explain that too many "thank you's" can be just as bad as not saying it all.

They didn't buy any of it, and we ended up tipping way too much.