ten thoughts on a wednesday |22| {new flat edition!}

 
one.
we are love, love, loving our new flat and new neighborhood. it was definitely sad to leave our tiny home in covent garden, and we miss so much about living there (more on this below), but we are so happy about where we landed. this move was the right timing and the right next step for our family. we still have a lot of settling in to do and logistics to work out, but things are coming together and we feel really, really grateful and blessed. moses has spent the last five days just relishing the extra living space that we now have – he just walks and walks and walks around the flat (while occasionally pumping his fists and/or jabbering excitedly).

^^ our furniture, purchased to fit in a very tiny space, doesn't exactly fit perfectly in our new bigger space, haha! before too long we are going to invest in a real, full-size couch! :) ^^

two.
i think my very favourite thing about our new flat is the windows. in the main/living room there’s a big bay window, and in our bedroom there’s a super tall window … with a lovely window seat!

three.
ian has transitioned from being a walking commuter to being a bike commuter. he loves the ride to and from work, which is mostly through london’s splendid parks. although we moved significantly further from his office, his commute has only increased by a few minutes on either side. moses loves to watch for dad to come home in the evenings, peering out the bay window on his tippy toes.

four.
our closest grocery store is honestly a wonderland. i am freaking out about it. it’s a gigantic supermarket that is allllmost like a target. i mean, they sell clothes there! and dishes! and tortilla chips and black beans! check out the selection of “squeezies” for moses below. i mean…! it’s by far the biggest grocery store i’ve experienced in london, and we are obsessed with it. it’s a three minute walk from our flat and tonight after moses goes to bed i am leaving ian at home just go explore.

also! we are about a ten minute walk from london’s biggest whole foods, which is also a total wonderland and has long been a fave spot of mine in this city, haha!
yep, i’m pretty giddy about the grocery shopping situation around here.

five.
we already love our neighbors that share our building. we are on the ground floor and we’ve met some really lovely people that live on the other floors. our downstairs neighbors even have a…wait for it…dog! moses hasn’t met said doggy yet but he is going to loooouuvvve seeing that furry friend on the regular!

six.
our front door is bright red, and this makes us really happy! you see, it was a bright red door at our old building that really sold us on committing to that flat when we were originally apartment-hunting in london two and a half years ago. we were considering a couple of other options but just kept getting drawn back to what we called “the one with the red door.” one day about a year ago i came home from a walk with moses and the door had been painted black! i stood there on the street with my jaw dropped for a good thirty seconds, devastated! when we came to view our new flat and we saw there was a red door, it kinda felt like a sign…! and we just love the bright pop of colour.

six.
our neighborhood is just amazing – i am in love with it.
we have a communal garden (which is accessible only by people who live on our square) just across the street from our (bright red!) front door. (we hope to get our keys to it in the next few weeks.)
there are darling mews streets and other garden squares all around us, and we are a fifteen minute walk from kensington gardens (part of huuuge hyde park) as well as the south kensington museums.
the neighborhood is much quieter than our old one, but it’s not too quiet … there’s quite a bit of pedestrians strolling past our building throughout the day and the busy thoroughfare of cromwell road is just down the street. it’s a perfect in-between for us – after living in the very center of this bustling city, we weren’t quite ready for something that felt at all suburban (although we were ready for something a bit calmer).
i was so pleased when i learned over the past few days that we have neighbors that get into halloween! halloween isn’t really a big deal in england generally, but i think it’s catching on more and more and some of the houses just up the way from us were super decked out yesterday (with cobwebs and pumpkins left over this morning when i snapped most of these photos below).
 

 



seven.
last saturday, we enjoyed our new neighborhood by meeting in kensington gardens to play in the autumn leaves. i’ve done this activity every twenty-eighth of october my entire life … it’s a deeply engrained family tradition for my dad’s birthday. it was a perfect fall morning and moses loved tramping around in the leaves and tossing them in the air … and watching his dad get buried and then pop out of fallen foliage!
london in the fall is really, really lovely.

 
 
 

eight.
along with all the exciting discoveries in our new neighborhood, we are sure missing a lot of things about our old neighborhood. i was in charge of our weekly date last week and i decided we should spend it back in trafalgar square/covent garden. there’s a few things i had on my list that i wanted to do before we moved that we didn’t do before the move since it turned out to be sooner than expected. it was such a peculiar feeling to get off the tube at our old stop and walk around familiar streets that used to be home but no longer are. we had afternoon tea at the top-floor restaurant at the national portrait gallery and then walked through covent garden and along the thames at sunset. both of these activities provided stellar views and it was kind of a perfect top-off on our time living in the very heart of london. my heart felt so at peace about the chapter closed and the chapter ended.




nine.
one specific thing i know we will continue to miss about where we used to live is proximity to london’s iconic sights – especially when we have visitors! it has been so much fun the past couple of years to walk friends and family that came to london to big ben and buckingham palace and st. paul’s in just a few minutes. ian’s sister sarah and her husband michael came to visit a few weeks ago and thus were our last visitors while living in covent garden. we of course took them on our trademark walking tours and loved showing them our ‘hood.
(we also traveled with them to normandy – posts from that trip are coming up!)


 
^^ moses loved being with his auntie sarah and uncle michael. it's so wonderful to watch these relationships develop. ^^
 
^^ mo and michael became quick best buddies. moses seriously adores michael! ^^

ten.
moving homes is such a great opportunity for resolutions and restarts and refreshing. i’m determined to use this transition to beef up my self-discipline and to recommit to my goals and hopes to be better, in lots of different ways. here’s to a glorious new start.

happy wednesday! life is beautiful!
(here’s a little wave from the little mo :) )