North Shore

Since things aren't very springy around here in NH, we headed just a bit south last weekend to our old stomping grounds on the North Shore of Boston.  My cousins were having a gender reveal party to share the news of who this next little baby to join the family will be, and we enjoyed a day trip visiting with family and playing at one of our favorite ocean parks.  Jon and Mere were thrilled to cut into their cake and find out that they're having another girl to join big sister E!

 Camden helped entertain all the little ones by reading to them.  It was precious...

After the party, we headed to Ocean Lawn to get some energy out with my Mom before hopping back in the car to head home.  It felt a little springy, but still windy and chilly!  At least it was warmer than New Hampshire - Camden hopped out of the car and ran around in circles yelling, "Grass!  I see grass!"  It was awesome!  :)

 Beautiful day!

 Exploring...

 Just noticing the colors in this photo!  I didn't touch an editor on any of these pics!  Pretty beautiful creation!

 Love our little family!

 Looking for shells...

 Poor little Sadie was sporting quite the outfit - she had a cute little dress on at the party, but turned into this to play outside!  :)

 Thankful for a fun day in Beverly.

"Spring" Break...

We have been thoroughly enjoying our time together as a family during Scott's Spring Break.  One of the many benefits of the boarding school life is a nice long vacation in March.  Sadly, it hasn't felt very springy - we're still dealing with frigid temperatures and it is snowing as I type this!  This has easily been the coldest and longest winter I can remember.

We started burning our wood stove in October, and here we are in the middle of March with the fire still burning 24/7.  We're almost out of the wood in our closest woodpile and the other pile is across the street and through the deep snow...no fun.  We're both pretty sick of going outside in freezing temperatures to get wood - especially at night.  Thankfully, Scott does the majority of the wood trips and I have the much more enjoyable job of stoking the fire and keeping it burning!  Here he is running outside in frigid temperatures a couple of nights ago for a load of wood - I married a real mountain man! 

While all of our friends and colleagues escaped to Florida for their spring break, we've been having a "stay-cation."  We've visited the Montshire Museum and the See Science Center in Manchester.  We've played lots of games of Trouble and the boys have been doing puzzles non-stop.  Camden is still in preschool, so we've been going about our usual business of school drop offs and grocery shopping and eyes appointments...

We decided we needed to do something extra special over vacation so we planned an overnight down on the North Shore of Boston.  We got a great deal on a package at a hotel that included a pass to a huge Coco Key Water resort that was adjacent to the hotel.  We had a pass to spend the entire day there on Sunday and looked forward to it for weeks!  We left early Sunday morning and went straight to our good friends house for a visit.  I babysat their kids for a few years and grew very close to this family.  Their oldest kids are now 16 and 17 and their youngest who I first held when he was only a few months old is now 10!!  It made me feel SO old to see them, but we had a wonderful time catching up - we just love those guys!  Having Scott hang out with those kids when they were little is how I first knew that he would be an incredible Dad.  He was so natural and fun and creative with them, and I remember thinking that many of my college guy friends would not be so hands-on!  He has certainly proven to be a great Dad - I couldn't tear him away from the Legos tonight to get the boys to bed!  After our visit we headed to the water park with high hopes of a fun afternoon.  Micah and Sadie both fell asleep in the car so when we arrived at the hotel, after circling the parking lot 4 times to try to find a spot, Camden and Scott went in to check the place out on their own.  Here's part of the text conversation that followed...

 "This place is my hell right now..."  I chuckled and thought he was overreacting until I saw it with my own eyes.  Oh my goodness - the place was crawling with literally hundreds of people...Kids running wild with no supervision, SO much noise that we couldn't hear ourselves think, kids flying down water slides and crashing into other kids at the bottom...it was pure chaos.  TOTALLY not our cup of tea at all.  Scott let Camden go down a small waterslide once or twice while I trekked in with the youngest two and then we headed into the actual hotel to see if our room was ready.  It wasn't, but I asked if we'd be allowed to use the hotel pool since the water park was so packed.  They were super nice and said it was no problem, even though we hadn't officially checked in yet.  Thankfully, this pool and the locker rooms were amazing - bright, sunny, quiet, calm - ahhhh - we finally breathed a sigh of relief.  The kids had a blast swimming in the pool and we had the whole place to ourselves!

 Love these guys!

After an afternoon in the pool we checked into our room which had an AWESOME set up.  A king size bed on one end of the room and two toddler beds at the other end with the bathroom in the middle.  It is a genius arrangement and the boys loved having their own little section of the room...

 We headed out for dinner and met my good friend Christina and her son at the huge Jordan's furniture for ice cream.  We had a chance to walk around and catch up a bit which was awesome...

 These two had a blast together...

We headed back to the hotel with hopes of hitting the water park for a little while before bed.  We had hoped that it would have cleared out by that time, and although it was still chaotic and busy, it was definitely better.  The boys had fun for about an hour or so and then we turned in for the night.  Overall, I would say the hotel was great, the water park was not our scene.  We got home and both agreed that we will never attempt that "fun" adventure again!

After the night in the hotel, we headed into Boston for a visit to the Museum of Science.  This museum is incredible and we all had a great time exploring (barring the major meltdown Micah had in the middle of the place!).

 Story time geared towards preschoolers they got to see real live animals!

 Dinosaurs...

We got a (cheap!!) family pass to the See Science Center in NH that allows us to visit the MOS in Boston and hundreds of other museums throughout the country for FREE!  Yeah!!!  Our overnight adventure might not have been quite as exciting as all of our friends who headed to Florida, but we enjoyed the adventure and definitely made some great memories together as a family!  What more could we want?!?! 

** All photos from my iPhone.  Sorry for the poor quality! **

Blogging and Tapping Trees

I'm back!  As you know, I took a 2+ month hiatus from the blog.  There were many reasons for this little break.  One reason is that my camera hasn't been working properly, and taking photos is such a big passion of mine and a reason why I keep this blog in the first place.  Another reason was questioning whether or not I want to have a blog in the first place for all the world to see.  I mean, I love having an outlet for my writing and photography, but it is a little creepy to have my family displayed for all to see on the internet.  Yet another reason for my lack of blogging was that as the anniversary of my Dad's passing approached I just felt so overwhelmed with how to address it, what to write, how open and honest to be, thoughts of whether people are tired of reading about my sadness and his death etc... And so I remained silent and let the thoughts pile up and swirl around in my head and I know at some point this year I'll finally let it all spill out on these pages.

I also felt like I wanted to clarify why I blog in the first place.
I am not blogging with the hopes of gaining a following or becoming a "famous" blogger.  I have friends who have gone that direction and it's been really fun watching their readership grow and seeing their success, but I don't really want to have lots of strangers reading about my life.  My main reason for blogging is to keep a journal of our lives.  Scott and I will often sit on the couch at night and click back through old blog posts and it's amazing how many wonderful memories we have because of this blog.  I spent hours and hours creating a photobook of my blog with text and pictures and I only made it through the first nine months of the blog or so...definitely a continuing project for the next few years!  Despite the major amount of effort, I'm so thrilled to have this story of our lives for us to always remember. 

I've realized that for too long I was worrying about what my small readership of friends and family would think of me and my writing, but now I've just decided to approach this blog primarily as a family journal and personal outlet for me and if people want to read it that's fine with me, but if not...I'm not offended!  :)  So, despite the fact that certain things I write here might sound like bragging, that is not my intention at all.  I'm hoping to write a post soon about the fact that Camden is reading.  And I'm not writing this because I want all six people who read my blog to gush over my son; I'm writing it because I want to remember the details on when and how my oldest child learned to read and how proud we are of him.  Writing about the little things that make us laugh, the way Micah says, "be-cept" instead of "except", the new things Sadie is saying and doing, the ways I'm missing my Dad, the excitement of life...these are the things I want to remember and this is why I'm resurrecting this blog.  I'm not going to promise a certain number of posts a week or pressure myself to meet a certain standard, I'm just going to plug away when I have time so that we have a journal of memories!  Here's to yet another new beginning! 

We are currently enduring the longest and coldest winter I can remember.  Temperatures have been so cold that we've been cooped up inside since November - ugh.  Usually over spring break we help collect sap on campus, but since the sugaring season is a few weeks behind this year we had the opportunity to help tap the trees today!  It was such a fun experience for the kids and Dave was an amazing teacher - helping the kids search the trunk of each tree to find old tap holes from years past, teaching them how to identify a sugar maple, letting them help drill, giving them a chance to use the hammer on their own and hang the buckets.  It was a beautiful day that actually reached about 42 degrees and it was nice to be outside and feel the sunshine on our faces.  Many of our fellow faculty-family friends are vacationing in Florida right now, so it was a small crew of helpers but we had a blast!  One of the (few) perks of not traveling over spring break!

 These two are going to be in Kindergarten together next year! 

 Buddies...

 Look at that concentration...

 Love the pom-poms...

 It's easy to climb trees when the snow is 5 feet high!

 Camden and Dave on the move...

 My handsome husband!

 Daddy's work gloves!

 Team work!

Most of the trees didn't have any sap running when we tapped them, but the squeals of joy were pretty amazing when we saw one tree start dripping right away.  Everyone, even the adults, got a taste of that fresh sap.  I guess spring is coming after all...