Fall (weather) has arrived!

Well today I saw Mom and Scott off, and they should be about back to the States by now. In all honesty, I am a bit jealous of them; I am starting to miss home, mainly from me being sick of living in a city, something I am hoping will be relieved as I start my travels. Fall break is in less than 2 weeks! Ireland & Italy, here I come! Anyways, here is what my family and I have been up to the last few days:

On Wednesday, I went to my internship and had a pretty pleasant day there. I began working on a little report for Lily, the Domestic Violence in-school Coordinator that is doing those activities at schools. I am going through the pre- and post-evaluations the students and teachers have filled out from her sessions. I am going through and doing a little quantitative analyses and will create a report for her to put in her files. Nothing fancy, but at least it's finally something I can use a little of my Psychology skills on! I WILL go with her on Tuesday afternoon to help with her activities at a primary school in Soho. From their pre-tests, it seems the kids there, in grades 5 and 6, have pretty progressive ideas about what is expected of boys & girls/men & women. One of the questions on the form asks, "Are there any jobs that are only for girls or only for boys?" and I did not see anyone answer that there were, apart from a few saying something like "policemen are boys, policewomen are girls." I wondered how kids in Iowa schools would respond. Mom and Scott came at the end of the day to see where I am interning, and my mom had a nice conversation with my supervisor about the social services. Then we headed over to the Phoenix Theatre where we saw the musical Blood Brothers. It was a great musical!! I don't know why I don't hear about it more, apparently it has been running for 20-some years. I think I enjoyed it more than Wicked. Before that, we ate at Spaghetti House, where I had the best dessert ever: a kind of layered ice-cream cake that had 3 layers of different flavors of gelato!! :)

Thursday, I had class and Mom and Scott headed to Windsor Castle for the day. I spent the rest of the day doing laundry and just hanging out in Vandon whilst they were away. Yesterday, Mom, Scott and I went to tour Westminster Abbey, which was an experience much like that at Buckingham Palace and St. Paul's Cathedral. Of course, my mom mostly enjoyed it because of the Royal Wedding held there last spring. (She's kind of obsessed with the Royal Family). ;) They continued on to the British War Museum whilst I went back to Vandon for a while. That night we tried to make it to the end of Portobello Market, but were only able to go into a few of the shops that were still open. They didn't get the full experience of the market, but they at least got to have a taste.

I think my family had a full and fun time here in the great city of London. If you see them sometime soon you should ask them about it, and maybe ask my mom about her experience with the pigeons... ;)

(That is, if they recover!)