I'll Break Your Conker

I was hoping to have some awesome news after our second day of home viewings today, but since a lease has not been signed yet, I'll have to confirm news in a future post. I will say, though, that today was a much nicer day to see the beautiful homes in Henley-on-Thames and that we are 99% sure that this will be our new village/town for the next 3-5 years! Yippee!!

When we met Myra (our realtor) for the first time, she told us about a little game that British children like to play called "conkers." While walking around to see one of the properties last week, Myra saw a conker tree (more formally known as a Horse Chestnut tree) and helped Audrey collect quite a large collection.

Conkers are the seeds which come from the Horse Chestnut trees found around England and Ireland. Young (and old) British children usually pick out a conker, drill a hole in it, and thread a piece of string through it. Once their conkers are ready, they pick a friend and sling their conkers at each other until one of them breaks. This sounds pretty violent and dangerous to me, but if sweet, old Myra was encouraging Audrey to have a go at it, it couldn't be that bad, right? Well, as you can see from the photo above, we were lacking some drilling equipment as well as string. Instead, we've been using the giant bag of conkers as math manipulatives during our homeschooling sessions to help Audrey with addition and subtraction!

When we saw Myra today, she had a surprise for Audrey: drilled and threaded conkers! Here are Audrey and Stegen trying their hand at playing conkers. I can't report that anyone actually won...since I don't think there was any actual conker contact. We'll have to try again tomorrow!

If you have some time and have any interest in reading about Henley-on-Thames, I would suggest visiting their town website (click here!). If you follow rowing at all, you'll be happy to know that we'll be living in the center of all the action during the Royal Regatta every summer...it takes place right in Henley! My fingers (and toes) are crossed that we'll have good news to share soon. In the meantime, Audrey would like me to let everyone know that in England, ladybugs have a different name: ladybirds. Fancy!