Spoiled

Well – it’s official…I got spoiled in the US last month! It was a little hard to adjust to being back here. Of course, after being back here for almost 6 weeks already, I’m used to it again…but here are some of the things I miss:

MY PARENTS!
A car - taxis and trains get old (and expensive!!!) really fast…
Carpet - ok, so we do have carpet in the 2 bedrooms, but it’s awful. It’s like indoor/outdoor carpet sort of. It seriously hurts to sit on it. You can feel things poking you, even through your clothes!
Mom’s home cooked food
Dishwasher
Garbage disposal - that would make washing dishes a lot easier actually!
A queen size bed
Extra sheets/bath towels – I have to make sure to always wash sheets in the morning so they are dry to put back on the bed that night! I wash towels after we both shower for the day, so that they’ll be dry to use the next morning.
Air conditioning for crazy hot days - hopefully we won’t have too many of those because our flat gets hot fast!
A normal tub/shower and a vent in the bathroom – our tub/shower is just weird. It’s narrow and tall, which makes it harder to get in and out of. It still drives me crazy that the shower curtain only goes halfway to the back of the shower, so little water droplets get all over everything. Plus, with no vent, it gets so steamy in there that seriously everything gets wet…ugh!
Comfortable furniture
A normal size fridge - ours is 2 and a half feet tall and 1 foot, 9 inches wide. It doesn’t hold much!
Grocery shopping – so much easier at home! It’s really a pain here because a taxi costs 5 Pounds (8 dollars) each way. So we always try to go when we are out on the weekends anyway. Anytime we take a train anywhere, we have to take a taxi to/from Slough, which is where the train station is. Since that’s where Tesco is too, we can avoid paying extra taxi fees if we shop at the end of a day out. But a lot of times that means shopping on Saturday late evening when we’re exhausted and starving. Our only other option to walk to the little Tesco, which is a little over a mile away. Grocery shopping was so much easier at home!)
Walmart – ok, so this goes along with the grocery shopping. But Walmart is just fabulous…you can get everything at Walmart! Tesco just isn’t quite the same – we still haven’t found a night light at any store here and we’ve been looking for one for months! Walmart would have night lights…
Going to sleep in the Dark – It’s light here till around 10:30 at night now! That means that it’s still light when we go to bed a lot of nights. With a skylight right over my head, that’s just weird!
Windows – We do have 2 halfway normal windows…one in the living room and one in the kitchen. They open outward a few inches though instead of raising like normal. We have skylights throughout the rest of the apartment. That wouldn’t be a problem if I could just reach them!!!! I have to stand on a chair to open them or close them. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem either, but with being pregnant, I just don’t like it!
Screens – This is actually the worst part about the windows and skylights. There are NO SCREENS! That means bees, flies, and spiders love to come in our apartment. The flies don’t bother me. The bees are a little scary, but at least we hear them and know when they are here. The spiders – I could seriously live without. I don’t know how many spiders I kill each day. I should start keeping track, but then again, I don’t think I want to know!!!
Dryer – Bath towels just aren’t the same when they are air dried. They are stiff and rough!!!! Most of our clothes actually dry ok, it’s just that I have to always make sure we don’t run out of anything. I have to wash everything at least a day before we’ll need it. There is no such thing as wash and dry so you can wear it later the same day!!! Plus, I only have one drying rack. That limits the amount of laundry I can do in a day! I brought back a bunch of extra hangars from home though and now I hang shirts on the top of the doorways to dry. So on a typical day, you have to duck to get in our bedroom, the extra bedroom, and little bathroom because there are shirts drying in the doorways! Ha!

Anyway, we are still very lucky and I know this! We live on hospital grounds, which makes it super easy for Phillip to walk back and forth to work. We have a totally decent flat for just the two of us, which means we never have to worry about other people coming and going! We don’t have to move when the baby arrives, which is fabulous!! We are perfectly content in our little flat and though I do miss those things, we truly have everything we really need. So I don’t mean to complain. We are just fine here. It’s just that we are spoiled in the US!!!!!!!!!!