We moved into the house in Eleanor Drive, Long Grove, IL, on the Monday (1st), arriving early to greet our air freight. It was while unpacking our four metres cubed that I realised what a spectacularly poor job of packing I had done. I thought I’d put things aside for air freight that didn’t actually make it, and unpacked items which will be redundant for the foreseeable future. For example, why would I need a booster seat for Madeleine without a chair to put it on? And how many dinners can you cook with only one saucepan but no sharp knives? I can only think that either the packers put things in the wrong box or everything I was using until the last possible moment, i.e. all the useful stuff, has taken the long route via ship. We’re managing pretty well though with our camping chairs and child-size table. We bought a futon from IKEA, which was so hard we required an emergency shop to buy a foam topper (memories of the children’s story The Princess and the Pea pop up here), and Madeleine has a new bunk bed “just like Patrick and Tom” (her cousins) as she keeps pointing out. Still, kind of feels like we’re treading water for the time being.

The snow has also made it difficult to orientate ourselves. When we arrived there was more than a foot of the stuff. It was quite icy so Madeleine (and me too if I was careful) could walk on top. Everything just looked white. The view from the house to the back garden was lovely, as the snow was completely unblemished except for funny waddle marks from wedded feet. Madeleine, Tilda and I went out into the garden to investigate, but I immediately felt guilty – were we allowed to walk on the snow? Or was there some rule of which we were ignorant. Householders are forbidden from putting up fences and washing as it spoils the view, so maybe the same logic was applied to virgin snow. There seems to be a lot of rules here. I get the impression that Americans like things to be spelt out for them; rules give boundaries, rather than limitations and restrictions. Basically, if you apply common sense you should be ok. In that case, I think it was ok to walk on the snow. So we did. There was a skid mark where the duck had landed and we followed the track as he walked in a circle and flew off again.

Madeleine wasn’t as impressed as I thought she should be, being a little preoccupied with wanting to make a snowman. The snow was perfect for this, but when I say she wanted to build a snowman, what I really mean is that she wanted me to make one. Tilda was getting cold so our snowman was pretty short, about the height of a litre of pop, and without a carrot for a nose. In Madeleine’s book this was not a real snowman.

But our chance to put this wrong right has melted with the snow. Despite the depth over the last couple of days it has disappeared with amazing speed. Everything looks very different. What I thought were fields are actually lakes (good job we didn’t walk very far), and everything is starting to get a little colour. We’ve had some brilliant sunny days, mist in the morning as the snow evaporates, and today rain. I’m glad we’ve missed most of the harsh winter and this weather is pretty typical of the UK, but people here must have cabin fever after three months of this. Very depressing.

I do think we’re going to be happy here though. I already love the space. The house is lovely and the people friendly. 

I feel a little overwhelmed by everything at the moment as I can’t make quick decisions based on brands I don’t recognise yet. The UK is small enough that you can shop around and compare and make a decision based on facts. It’s too big here, with too much choice, to do that. There is always something cheaper, quicker, nearer, more convenient, and its best just to accept that you’ve made the best decision you can based on the information you have. There are infinite possibilities, it’s fantastic when you have choice, but you need to put up with the slight nagging feeling that you might be missing out on something else because you haven’t been able to do infinite research.

Shopping around is almost an art form. I suppose that’s because in the UK shops are all within walking distance of each other in the middle of town. Here you drive to everything and unless you can be bothered getting the children in and out of the car you tend to buy in the first place you see. We made the mistake of spending a lot of money in one place to then be offered a 20% off voucher. I get the feeling the prices might be artificially high as there are so many vouchers and it is expected that you will purchase your goods using one. So very quickly I have learnt that your first shop should be a modest one, which enables you to get on a mailing list for vouchers to spend on subsequent trips. Then you have to remember that you have the damn things. And then to add to the problems that everything has different names. Who thought we had the same language. Diaper is a nappy, napkin is a serviette, silverware is cutlery, canker is a mouth ulcer! That one was difficult to fathom in the pharmacy.

The girls are adapting well though, better than us in some ways. Madeleine even told me I was changing Tilda’s diaper. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself correcting her; after all she is going to need the Americanisms when she goes to preschool. At the moment she is determined that everything has a colour. Every question she asks is followed by another question, usually, what colour is it? “What colour is your house?”, “what colour is your car?” are typical ones, but it did create an embarrassing conversation with one lady. It went something like this:

Madeleine: “What are you doing?”
Lady: “I’m waiting for my friend.”
Madeleine: “What colour is she?”
Lady: “Err, um, Korean.” 
Silence.

Little children can be trusted to cross social barriers. Where adults see these barriers as twelve foot brick walls with barbed wire on top, to children they are imperceptible. Namely when Madeleine asked me in a very loud voice in the bank: “Why does the lady have a big, big tummy?”

Granted, it was true, but perhaps the social graces required in polite society are not yet on our daughter’s register.

We landed at Chicago literally with a bump, after a fairly smooth flight. The girls were pretty well behaved, but it is called cabin fever for a reason. Hyperactive and bored babies and toddlers, though, seem to get back stage passes not available to the rest of the passengers. To Andy’s chagrin this meant a trip to see the captain, and even the chance to sit in his chair and press the buttons, after we had landed, I have to add quickly.

For some reason the children suffer with jetlag on the outbound trip and we tend to suffer on the way back. It took them about five days to get over the six-hour time difference, and of course the girls wake up at different times. Tilda started her day, and ours, at 5am every day for four days but has rewarded us with two days of sleeping through without a feed. Could this be the start of my first regular full night’s sleep since she was born?

We spent the first three nights at the Renaissance hotel in Schaumburg, which was, given our previous experience of American hostelry (non-descript motel), surprisingly pleasant. Cool, interesting architecture, which strangely given the sub-zero temperatures relied on water to cascade along flying buttresses. Needless to say the water has been switched off so the building entrance resembled not much more than a multi-storey car park ramp. Would have been much more interesting to have made use of the freeze and created an ice sculpture. The central atrium within the hotel was decorated in modern chic with interesting furniture and a fantastic fireplace with a huge canopy that you could walk all the way round.

So here we are at the start of a new adventure. When everything is new it’s always exciting. My eyes are open. And how you view your new adventure depends on the filter you put on your eyes. Are we stuck in a grey, flat, icy landscape, thousands of miles and several timezones from our family? Or are we about to discover a new way of life? Let’s see.