Boston With Kids

For the past 9 years, we have called Boston home.  No question, we have taken advantage of a ton of things that Boston has to offer for families.  Finding the things to do with families in Boston has been a combo of luck, research, knowing people that have lived here their whole life and a ton of planning.  The thing is, we always (as people tend to do) focus on going somewhere else and not really take advantage of the town we live in.  So, we have decided to focus on the greater Boston area with things to do.   That does not mean we are not going to travel outside of Boston, just we are going to make an effort to document what we do here in Boston.

Kayaking in the Boston Harbor

We have one real goal and one goal that is only mine.  We are going to do 26 things around Boston and blog about them before the end of 2018/2019.  Every post will be brought back here to be added to the master list with a link on it, making it easy to find everything from this list.  Sounds easy, right?  So let's see if it actually happens.

1)

Tired of me Complaining

I think that my father is tired of me complaining about the heat in Boston every single time we are on the phone.  So we received this in the mail.  It is an industrial strength one and makes it feel like we are in a hurricane. 

It's Hot!

Not to complain about the weather, but seriously, it is freaking hot. I mean really hot...and humid. Not the best combination in the world. Yesterday we decided to go to a program at one of the local libraries. Only problem was after walking 3 miles (5km) to the library, I discovered that I went to the wrong one. Then the red line was having issues, so it took almost 2 hours to get home from dropping M off at the airport for a 2 week trip to California.

Did I mention that it was freaking hot.

Difference between Sweden and USA

Yesterday was the 4th of July celebration in Boston. Somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 people were sitting along the banks of the Charles River to enjoy music and fireworks. Of all those people, we only saw one of them drinking. Compare that to last of April in Uppsala. We will be generous and say 100,000 people are there and about 1,000 of them are not drunk. Much nicer without the drunks.

Revere Beach

Lazy, raining, bad day yesterday

Yesterday did not go as planned...at all. In the morning we were suppose to go to the park (with the strollers, yea!), but I could not get Z ready until after 11. So that did not happen. Then in the afternoon we were suppose to go to the Natural History Museum, but that did not happen either because it was raining (and I could not be bothered to make the kids go to another museum when I would have to get them in all of the rain clothes and such). So instead we stayed home in the afternoon. The girls did do some really cool art though.

Instead, here are a couple of pictures from the Museum of Science on Sunday. The electricity show was excellent, I highly recommend it. Both M and I learned stuff in it.


We were not there too long. Mainly my fault. I had to run home again after we had already left. We did get to play with the magnets though, which was a good continuation from my . Mr. Magnet the day before.

Spring is in the air

It is spring in the Boston area. I would like to point this out only because they got snow yesterday in Stockholm, mwaaahahaha (evil laugh! The laugh is very important and all too often is forgotten)! Most of these were taken yesterday between our place and the neighborhood park. It really is a beautiful time right now.










Just don't ask me what they are. I know one is a crab apple tree and one is tulips. Other then that, no idea.

Mother's Day Hint #2

Here is today's hint. It involves a bird boat, or is it a boat bird. I don't know. That is the hint though.

MIT Open House

One of the things that I love about Boston/Cambridge is that their is always something going on. I am sure that all big cities have this going for it, but Boston is excellent for that. Much more then other big cities I have been in.

Case in point, this weekend was crammed pack with things to do. Saturday was the start of Cambridge Science Week and it was also an open house at MIT to celebrate their 150 anniversary, Native American Pow Wow at Harvard, Art Day at Harvard and I am sure a whole lot more.


We decided to go to the open house at MIT (shocking, I know). It was a bit overwhelming the number of activities that they had planned. We tried to investigate before hand, but honestly, the website was crap in trying to figure out what was going on. So we just went there and found a couple of things. We all had our different favorite ones. I liked the blimp races, though I was the only one. M liked Mr. Magnet (an older guy who did magnet experiments for the younger kids. Both girls got to help out, which they were excited about). Z's was the bouncy castle and slide and N's was using the pedometer to see if she could win an ipad (we didn't, or I should say she didn't).


It was a lot of fun and it was the first time they have had an open house like this at MIT for 40 years or something, so that is cool. I would of liked to take the girls to the Pow Wow though. It took me back to my OA days and it is a very cool part of our history/culture. In fairness though, we did not know it was happening until I happen to be walking by and heard the drums. Oh yell, next time.

Oh how I miss her

I think that I miss M the most at breakfast. Isn't that just so romantic of me? Though it is not why one might think. Z likes to sit in someone's lap during breakfast. I like to read the paper. Usually it is M's lap she sits in. M is on a business trip, so it is mine. It makes reading the paper very difficult. Cozy, but difficult.

Of course I always miss M. Time to finish cleaning up after breakfast.

(On a similar note, I asked the girls what they wanted for breakfast. Both said that they wanted popcorn and smoothie for breakfast.)

It is 8.30 in the morning

It is 8.30 in the morning and so far we have-

- read three chapters in a book
- eaten breakfast
- skyped with Mamma
- picked up breakfast
- did our Swedish homework
- played a board game
- picked up the house
- colored
- I am sure that I forgot something

Isn't jet lag great.

4 Hours of My Life

Z's birthday was last week and she got some legos from both sets of grandparents. As much as I love legos, they do not have very many with female characters in it and Z noticed this. She also got $5 as one of her gifts. With this money, she decided that she wanted lego girls. this is easier said then done. She and I went on a mission yesterday and failed. Not one store sold any lego girls. In fact, no sets that we found had any lego girls either. We agreed that today we would go to the lego store.

Now this is easier said then done. It is the complete opposite end of Boston. In fact, it is the last stop on the red line and then a bus. I was sent by myself today and thankfully I was, because it was a 4 hour journey, 1hour 30 minutes to get there, 1 hour 30 minutes to get back and 1 hour at the mall.

She was happy though and liked two of the three. She really liked the pirate girl, liked the girl bomber and gave the teacher in pink to N. She makes me laugh.


Of course it was a little of an issue getting her to spend her money. We said that it was 7 dollars, which she had. She gave me $2 and told me to spend my money on the rest. In the end, we agreed that we were going to start giving a weekly allowance.

Morning People

I am a morning person, I love to get up in the morning and get started. In fact, my most productive part of the day (when I went to the office for work) was when between 6 and 8:30 am, before anyone arrived.

Now, N is a morning person too. She is usually the first person out of bed and almost always in a happy mood. She wants to share her share her good mood with everyone. She sings, gives lots of hugs and kisses, dances and talks a mile a minute.

Here is the issue, I am a quiet morning person and she is a LOUD morning person. They do not go together, it is like oil and water. The level of noise in the morning is enough to drive me crazy (actually, it does drive me crazy). It puts me in a bad mood before breakfast is ever served. Oh, how can two morning people be so different.

I Finally hung them up

Here is one of the crafts that the girls and I did last week when we were stuck inside all day. I had been wanting to do it for a while, but I always thought that it was a little too much of a pain. Then I was told just to use a coffee filter. Super easy, quick and the girls loved it.


I had to show a close up of the Yoda one. Yes, it is my favorite:

A Motivated M

Somehow M managed to get enough energy to sew a new curtain for the girls room. She and the girls sewed it Saturday night/Sunday morning. I think that it looks pretty good. It has given me some inspiration for the girls bed spread. I am thinking a story book bead spread.

My day in pictures

I can show how my day has been in pictures. This morning, I felt mostly like this:


It got better in the afternoon actually, but on the way home from Swedish School (it was -6.6 Celsius or 20 Fahrenheit before the wind chill factor and the wind was really blowing), I was like this:

The one positive was that when we were waiting for the train to come, the girls asked me to sing songs that they have never heard before. The only songs I actually know are camp songs, so that is what we did. Several I had actually forgotten about, but we sang "With a wing on their left" (my friend Jack had another verse to this song about hunting the birds, but I could not remember that one), "Susie went a'wading" (which I had to sing twice), "Mexican Juniper" (which was always Jason's song, even though he messed it up 73.2 percent of the time) and a couple more. So in honor of the songs, I thought that I would post this picture from 2001 at Worth Ranch. God we look young:


For those looking at it on facebook, I think that if you want to see the pictures, you will have to actually look at the blog to see it.

Snowed In

Right now, we have way too much snow in Boston. When we walk down the street, I feel as though I am on Hoth. What makes it worse, everything gets canceled. This week Swedish School and swim classes were canceled. Which means that I had to find extra stuff for us to do.

We did manage to get out some this week, everyday actually for a couple of hours each day. In N's music class today, one of the other parents said that this was the first time that her son was out of the house all week. I think that I would go CRAZY if I had to stay in the house with the kids all week without going out.




We also have done a ton of baking. I am going to weigh a ton if we continue with this. We baked chocolate chip cookies, Rice Crispy treats and brownies this week. That is enough to last us a life time. We were a little creative with the Rice Crispy treats. We did hearts to get ready for Valentines day and Mickey Mouse heads because because I am in a Disney mood.



We also started the Daddy work day. Big project for this week was fixing the table. When I took the top off, the entire table just fell apart. Took about 3 hours to complete it. Would have been a lot shorter, but help was there.


After all week of saying no, I finally gave in with the hair color for the girls. They picked red, blue and silver. After they were done, N said "look Daddy, you have silver in your hair as well!" Aren't kids great?

A Nice Little "Vacation"

Everything seemed like it was going like it was suppose to. Everything was packed, the girls were up and ready to go, we left the house in plenty of time and everyone was in a great mood. N and Z were in a good mood because they were going to see Grandma and Grandpa, while I was in a good mood thinking about some well earned time away from the kids. In fact, things were going too good.

It is very important to mention here that it is just N and Z and myself. M is at a conference, so this is our first vacation with out here. See, M and I usually have a plan. One of us will take care of the luggage and one of us will take care of the kids. It is such a good plan. This time I was in charge of everything. I got to the airport 2 hours in advance. My father was making fun of me because we were arriving so early. We got off the bus and then walked in the airport when I realized that I had left my and N's backpack on the bus. I told the girls to wait there and I sprinted to the next terminal only to miss it by a minute. In my bag it had all of my clothes, computer and flight information. In N's bag, it was her doll (much more important then my back, that is for sure). By the time that I got back to our terminal, security was there watching the girls.

We waited for the next bus to come and when he arrived, he called dispatch to look for the backpack. Then we went to check in and wait for our bus make it all the way around again. Thank God our bags were in there. N told me that she was glad that M was not there, as she would not be happy about it. Personally I was beyond sick to my stomach over the whole thing.

When we finally made it through security, we only had about 30 minutes before departure. It was not until we loaded the plan that I noticed that N and Z had seats together, but I was in a row behind. The guy was very nice and swapped with me. I am honestly not sure if it was me or the guy who was nice.

On that flight, I started thinking. If we did not have seats together on the second flight, I wonder what we will have on our next flight. It turned out that we had seats on three different rows. I tried to get it fixed during our 4 hour layover, but no good. I had to try and swap it on the plane. It almost did not work, since one guy had to sit on the aisle seat. It took all my will power not to just set the girls next to him and be done with it. It did work out though...in the end.

Best wife...EVER!

I really do have the best wife ever. On Tuesday when I got home from Swedish school, she was waiting for me with a computer. The best part, she had already loaded everything on the computer (one of my least favorite things to do). Just in time for the World Series in baseball (GO RANGERS!) and fantasy basketball.

Now if I can only convince her to let me take a vacation by myself. Next year

Going to Prison

Well, I almost was arrested today. me and the girls were walking down the street when a cop said hi to the girls and asked if they were having a nice day. Z looked straight at the cop and stuck her tongue out at him. Thankfully he just laughed. I have to admit, it made me laugh.