The day before...

We started today worshiping at Belmont United Methodist Church, a large, traditional UMC only about 300 feet from our house! And in true McKelvy fashion, we got there about two minutes late... The worship service was 'high' - strict order of worship, sung responses to everything, full service of word and table for Holy Communion. However, the dress was casual - everything from dress and suit to blue jeans to shorts. It was a strange contrast, but it worked. We can hear the chimes from the carillon clearly from our house, and in addition to chiming the hours, they play 'mini-concerts' of hymns a couple of times a day. Tonight at about 6pm the songs were "Just As I Am," and "Sweet Hour of Prayer." We've known almost all of the hymns so far!




My friend Dana from college asked about the house, so I'm posting a picture of the outside today. More about the neighborhood later, but we did meet a neighbor today who is a professor at Harvard Divinity School, plus several neat people from church this morning. It was about 40 degrees colder today than yesterday (almost 90F Saturday, barely 53F today), so we remained inside more. We did take a bicycle ride down to Jamie's school (Chenery, about 0.5 miles away), and Rachel practiced riding her two wheeler.

David fell today running down the sidewalk and scraped his knee pretty bad - Sonja says that this was his first real boo-boo. He cried a bit when it happened, but was up and running again a few minutes later - and didn't fuss at all when we put the Texas sized bandage on him.

Sonja will have to tell you about the beautiful park we discovered yesterday about a mile from our house - Beaver Brook Reservation. I'm sure they will be going back quite a bit.

One final note - you will be happy to learn that Isik (pronounced like Isaac), our miraculous White's Dumpy tree frog, successfully made the trip from Alabama to Massachusetts, and as of today is happily residing in Jamie and David's room. I'll post a couple of pictures soon.

Tomorrow is the big day - we begin the Sloan Fellows class of 2008 tomorrow morning at MIT, so look for updates from Sonja...