Local Attractions

I've officially cut my workweek down to 80% time, meaning that I have Fridays at home with both kids--a wide open 8.5 hours to fill. My experiences this past spring taught me that preparation is essential if I am going to do anything with the two of them...it is far too easy to get caught puttering around at home, cleaning here, redirecting there, and then all of a sudden it is 11 am and too late to do anything.

Today was my first official Friday off, and I had planned to do something somewhat interesting with Andres and Celia. That all changed yesterday when I got a call around noon that Andres had thrown up at daycare and needed to be picked up (and cleaned up!) immediately. He had a stomach bug of some sort and spent the rest of the day on the couch watching obscene amounts of TV--Toy Story 2, Curious George, Super Why, Toy Story 1--just trying to recover. The poor guy was miserable...writhing around a little, fading in and out of sleep, just wiped out. Oh and he threw up on me once too. (He did win a lot of cute points though...on the way home from Betty's, he asked where Celia was; I told him that she was staying because she wasn't sick. "But I miss my Celia!" was the plaintive retort from the back seat.)

So I changed my Friday plans from "fun" to "triage." I figured long car trips would be no good in case he was still sick, and the weather turned out to be pretty crappy as well, so I thought we may as well stay around here and try to find something interesting to do. And after about 20 minutes of being alone with them this morning I knew we had to get out of the house in order to preserve everyone's sanity.

I managed to get everyone dressed, changed, fed, and caffeinated (me) before 9:30, and then I popped them in the car for a quick ride to Riverside Station. I thought Andres would like the trains and Celia would tolerate being in the carseat for a little while...I was right on both counts, so it was a good, inexpensive field trip.





We did eventually get on a train (we didn't go anywhere--we just hopped on for a sec), an experience that left Andres talking about taking the train all the way into the city. I think he was a little disappointed that we were not going anywhere today, but he was also skittish about the trains' noise, so perhaps he was a little relieved (privately, of course) that we turned around and headed back to the car.

The MBTA conductors we met there were also fantastic--one let us get on the platform without paying, gave Andres his very own Charlie Card, and also tipped me off to the idea of going to Castle Island to watch the planes enter and exit Logan. So I may be writing about that in this space fairly soon.

After Riverside we headed to the Waltham Library. Andres played with the Thomas trains like he always does, but he seemed less enthused about it this time--perhaps the large number of other kids there turned him off. At one point he even wanted to read a book with me; an unprecedented event (even at the library, ironically) when there are trains and train tracks present. Celia napped for a bit and then crawled around on the library floor looking for toys to play with; we eventually found some bristle blocks (which I had to remove from her mouth repeatedly).

Noon came (it felt like 3pm at this point) and everyone was starting to get hungry and cranky so we headed home. Not a bad morning, albeit impromptu and decidedly low-key...hopefully Andres' bug will leave soon and he'll be up for more interesting adventures next week.