London Town

Our daughter Mirabelle was born in March 2007 and two and a half months later, we packed up as a threesome to spend a summer in London.  We had visited the city once before as a couple for a few days in May 2001, but were looking forward to getting to know it better.

I didn't realize it until much later, but London is an extremely baby-friendly city.  There are clean baby changing stations in nearly every McDonalds and Starbucks (which are ubiquitous) and fortunately you don't need to purchase something to use them.  This was a stark contrast to Paris.  A few weeks into our London summer, we took weekend trip.  After finding numerous Starbucks and McDonalds with no baby changing stations, I started asking people on the street where I could "changer le bébé?" but no one had any suggestions.  Had this never come up before?  We finally found a Paris museum which had a wooden shelf in the bathroom that served the purpose.  After that, we changed her outdoors in her stroller. 

I also didn't realize until later that the pre-crawling stage is a great time to travel with a baby.  Our daughter was a dream on the flights -- she mostly slept.  One older gentlemen even commented on how 'well behaved' she was, which I found amusing.  Since she couldn't get around on her own, it meant that we didn't have to do any real baby-proofing in our various London apartments.  And she didn't need much in the way of toys and other accoutrements -- we packed two large suitcases for the three of us for the entire summer along with her co-sleeper pack-n-play.

My husband Geoff had found us an apartment in advance, figuring it would be too difficult to start hunting when we arrived.  He had settled on the Chelsea area since we knew some friends who lived there, but the closest he was able to find on Gumtree was a newly renovated apartment in Battersea.  Even though Mirabelle still slept in our bedroom at that point, we needed a two bedroom since Geoff's cousin Ashley would spend the summer with us to help with Mirabelle.

Although the apartment turned out to be lovely (albeit small), I decided I would hunt for another that was a bit more central, even though it meant moving again.  Battersea, although up-and-coming, is on the southern end of the map, and Chelsea was about a 15 minute walk and central London nearly an hour on the bus.  [Another great thing about London: you can wheel a stroller right onto a bus or into a taxi].  Of course, apartment searches are always exhausting but they are a bit more harrowing with a 2 month baby.  After seeing a series of fairly awful places, I chose a place in Marylebone becaue it had an elevator and a truly great location -- a quick walk to Regents Park, a far walk to Hyde Park (I took a Buggyfit class at both), and a 15-minute walk to any central London location.

I'd say my favorite things about London were the international food (Lebanese, Indian, Chinese), the people (the women I met with kids were extremely friendly even to a temporary expatriate like myself), and the parks.  The parks are like nowhere else I've ever been -- they are enormous with cafés, theatres, sculpture exhibits, walking paths, rose gardens and more.

My biggest complaints about London were the prices and the weather.  We happened to go when it was about two American dollars to a British pound.  Eventually, I had to start pretending the prices were dollars or I would have never eaten fruit or ice cream or anything for that matter.  The only deals to be consumed in London were beer and baby formula.  Ironically, I was worried how we would get Mirabelle to adjust from Similac to U.K. baby formulas.  But after discovering Cow & Gate, I wasn't sure how I was going to put her back on Similac.  The 'baby milk' is so inexpensive, we were able to import Cow & Gate from BritSuperStore and even with overseas shipping, it still wasn't as expensive as U.S. formulas.

As for the weather, it was just awful  People joke that London is a rainy city, but to me it is no joke.  After several weeks of daily rain, my sinuses had completely stopped functioning properly.  I became an addict of Alka Seltzer Plus.  I've never seen a place where it change from monsoon to sunshine and back again in a matter of minutes.  Let's put it this way: none of my Buggyfit classes were ever canceled due to rain (nor was our Shakespeare in the park) because if they were, they literally wouldn't have any.  In our trip to Stonehenge, we all bought ponchos (it rained obviously) and at one point I figured I should just put the poncho on and just take it off before we got on the plane back to the U.S.  The weather was so miserable, that I felt I had completely missed summer.  I was glad we had planned to spend August in Connecticut where I would finally dry out.  To be fair, it was supposedly London's wettest summer on record.  But you can be sure I won't be going back another summer to test out if that record can be beat.

As for Mirabelle, she earned her nickname that summer: "baby ambassador."  It turned out she was a fairly adaptable baby -- adjusting from time zones and apartments and climates with more ease than us.  And she'd sleep just about anywhere, including the floor of a  Lebanese restaurant -- as long as it was in her car seat, which seemed appropriate since she was after all a girl on the go.