Boston Adventure

We had such a great overnight trip to Boston over the weekend!  We got a great last-minute hotel deal and paid about 1/4 of the price for a room in the fancy Westin Waterfront hotel.  Scott and I are not city people at all.  We both grow up in rural areas and even though we went to college within a half an hour of downtown Boston, we rarely ventured into the city.  At one point in college we tried to have a hot date and go downtown.  We got all dressed up, and had a plan to find a restaurant in the North End like so many of our friends loved to do.  We got into the city, walked around aimlessly for a couple hours.  We found some restaurants, but they were either too expensive or busy and we ended up heading back to the North Shore and going out to eat at Sylvan Street Grill which is just a normal chain(ish) type of restaurant that we frequented.  Oh well.  Our best laid plans didn't quite turn out how we had hoped, but that was so typical of us.  We just weren't/aren't city people.  Needless to say, we don't make it to Boston very often, even though we're only about 90 minutes away, but we were feeling brave and spontaneous and wanting to do something fun with the boys before we turn into a family of five!  And so we got some advice from friends, made some tentative plans and took off.  Unfortunately, we had to delay our departure due to some serious snow, but we eventually made it.
The boys were very excited about our adventure!

 We pulled over for a little pit stop at Jordan's Furniture in Reading, MA for lunch at Fuddruckers, Richardson's ice cream, and letting the kids run around a bit.  They had a blast watching the acrobats, the light/fountain show and seeing all of the awesome things made out of jelly beans!  Definitely a great place to stop with kids (especially because you don't have to spend any money if you don't want to)!

  After getting settled into our hotel, and taking our first dip in the pool, we headed down the road to the Boston Children's Museum.  After doing a bit of research, I discovered that the museum admits people for $1 from 5:00-9:00pm on Friday nights.  This is a HUGE deal as it would have regularly cost us $56 to all go!  What a deal!  It was an awesome museum and the boys had an absolute blast!
In front of the museum... 

 Micah and Daddy making a movie!

 Shooting hoops...

 Micah LOVED this water table!

It's always interesting trying to get the boys to sleep in a hotel.  Micah cried, and kicked, and screamed for about an hour saying he wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed, but he finally settled down and since we didn't want to wake the boys up Scott and I ended up going to bed very early too.  We went for a swim bright and early in the morning...
Camden found some water wings and loved swimming on his own!  He hasn't quite mastered swimming yet, so this was really great practice for him.  

After packing up our room, we headed to the Museum of Science.  We have a reciprocal pass through the Children's Museum of New Hampshire that allows us to visit hundreds of other museums for free with our pass!  We realized just days before that our pass covers the Museum of Science so we got to go for free!  What an awesome place!  We all had a blast and were completely exhausted by the end of our adventure!

 The boys LOVED the dinosaur exhibit!

 We watched a little chick poking it's way out of it's shell.  Apparently it takes anywhere from 1-24 hours for a chick to fully hatch, so we didn't see the whole thing, but it was pretty amazing!

 Overall we had a wonderful time together as a family and were pretty proud of how much we squeezed in on a small budget! 

 I was TIRED from carrying this guy around the city along with Baby Goose!  We were all wiped out!

 Camden was too tired to smile...

We were all exhausted by noon and headed for home.  We had considered walking around Boston Common, but I'm not sure my legs could have done much more walking.  We'll come back in the summer to cover the things we missed on this trip!

Back at home we splashed around our little quiet dead end road and were once again reminded that this is where we belong.  The city is fun to visit, but this is home.