Day 3: Boston! 
By this time on our trip we were all tired out. We hadn’t been getting very good sleep. The 2nd night in the hotel was worse than the first night even though we separated all three boys. Rock had gotten no sleep due to a work release gone wrong and I didn’t get much more sleep than him. I suppose we were crazy to try and take on Boston, but we’d come this far and the boys (and I) were excited to see the sights, so we headed into town.

First stop: The  Boston temple!

Once in Boston we walked the Freedom Trail which takes you to most of the important historical sights.

Park Street Church

Granary Burying Ground where several big names are buried

Paul Revere

John Hancock

Samuel Adams

The Old South Meeting House, where the Boston Tea Party began

The boys LOVED the thought of the colonists dressing up as Indians here.

Paul Revere’s House

Our last stop was the Old North Church where hung the famous Two Lanterns. “One if by land, two if by sea.” This was another place I’ve longed to see all my life. Right there in that top window sat the two lanterns! That’s just so cool!

This huge statue of Revere stands in front of the church. He is truly larger than life now for my boys. A real hero for them.

Exhaustion took over at this point and we had to quit before we’d seen everything. The boys were really bummed they couldn’t go to Bunker Hill and reenact their favorite line, “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!” and I was really bummed not to be able to see the sight where the Boston Tea Party happened. But both were too far away and I had a long night of driving ahead of me so we called it quits. Someday Rock and I will go back so I can take all the tours and go in every building!  To ease the disappointment we took the kids to Dunkin Donuts. My wonderful exhausted husband took all the kids in by himself so I could get a 20 minute nap in the car.


Yum.

I then drove home by myself with the kids (Rock was staying in Boston for a conference.) It was the worst traffic I have ever driven in. A four hour trip took five and the only way I made it home awake was by eating lots of sugar and Doritos! My system revolted from all that junk that I haven’t eaten in a long time and it made my long day a very long night as well.

But it was worth it! The boys loved the trip and really got a lot out of it, I think. Hopefully they’ll be able to remember this trip years from now, but if not, I hope it at least instilled in them an appreciation for their country and the great men and women who fought to make it free.

Yep, that’s right. Levi missed his second home in the ER too much and so today we had to take him back for a visit.
He was told over and over that on pain of death was he ever to touch Reagan’s pocket knife. Today the temptation became too great for him and he ended up with a BIG TIME natural consequence from of it. (And a very thorough tongue lashing from Dad.) While trying to close the knife he sliced his finger something awful. He tried to hide it by attempting to get his own band aid, but that didn’t work out too well for him and he had to call in a parent.
He is now so comfortable with the whole ER process that he just jabbered away telling the doctors and nurses all about his birthday plans and regaling them with renditions of The Itsy Bitsy Spider all while they were stitching him up. If only they served popcorn with the movie they put in for him, he’d never want to come home!
Do you think we could get some money out of the Guinness Book of World Records people when he wins ‘Most Stitches Before the Age of Five contest? By the way, for those who are curious, his total (after the five he got today) is now up to 30.

“Just call me Stitch.”

Day 2: Plymouth and then Boston. Plymouth and the rest of Lexington and Concord.
This day the boys were up at 5:30 AM after keeping each other up until 10:30 the night before. I awoke to squealing from their room at 6:00 and walked in ready to knock some heads together. I opened the door and found them having a pillow fight. Well guess what? For once in my life I actually thought before I reacted and instead of yelling, I picked up a pillow and joined the fight! I know, it’s shocking. It’s so sad that it is shocking, but someday I WILL loosen up and these kinds of wonderful moments won’t be so few and far between. The kids were so stunned they didn’t know what to do with themselves. So naturally, I won.

After back tracking an hour to get to Plimoth Plantation, we found that Levi had a surprise for us. We discovered that rather than use the back seat beverage holder as intended, he had dumped his water bottle into the holder, hoping to…. lap it out??? Who knows. And no, I didn’t start a water fight with him, just in case you’re wondering.

Plimoth Plantation-as the Pilgrims would have known it. This was great. Actors dressed up, spoke and worked just like the Pilgrims.


Gardens

Homes

The Oven

One of the Pilgrims tried to convince us to move to Plimoth Colony and told us all about the land we’d get if we did. As we were leaving Cade said, “So can we move here, Mom?” Mmm, no. Pretty sure, NO. I like my microwave thank you very much.

Plimoth Plantation also has Indian homes as well.



We got to watch them burning out the inside of a tree to make a boat.

Next stop was Plymouth Rock which they have protected in this portico.


Sorry, the lighting was bad. Everything I heard about the rock before we came made it sound pretty uninteresting, but I thought it was plenty big and I loved seeing it.

The Mayflower II

As we drove away from Plymouth, Rock and I were discussing the fact that Plimoth Plantation was not on the actual sight of the first Plymouth Colony, but actually a few miles away and that the people there were just actors. Cade overheard this and yelled with indignation from the back seat , “You mean it was all a fake!!!!”

Next stop was Lexington Green where the ‘shot heard round the world’ was fired.

Where the line of the minutemen stood. Cade decided to memorize this quote from Captain Parker:

I’m a little behind in my blogging thanks to the storm, so here, finally, is our trip to Boston. 

My dream is to see EVERY important history sight on the East Coast and even though that is impossible, we are slowly checking the big ones off our list.  At the end of October we went to Boston.  We spent the month prior to the trip studying all about the American Revolution so the boys would be able to appreciate what they were seeing and understand its significance.   I have to say that I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.  They ate up every detail, every book and every activity we did in preparation for this trip.  They could not get enough!   By the time we left on our trip they really knew their stuff.  They were so excited to see these places from such an important time in our country’s history.  I was thrilled because one of my main goals of homeschooling is to help them understand and love their country,  its founding principles and its founding fathers. Was it an easy trip?  Nope, not with four little kids.  But I think I can say it was worth it.

The Preparations:

As part of our studies we learned about the Boston Tea Party and had our own tea party with homemade scones from the time period, hot chocolate and our own homemade candles.  I did try the real beeswax dipping process, but the instructions I got online must have been bogus because it didn’t work!  We gave up on the dipping and dumped the wax into some Styrofoam cups.  Not as authentic as I’d hoped, but the kids were happy.

Long live the king!!  ( I know, cheesy beyond belief, but so fun!)

Here is the stack of books on the Revolution that we read during our study.

The librarians think I’m a nut.  I suppose I am.  I could fill 2 laundry baskets with the books I get on each trip to the library.  But my boys are reading so voraciously now I cannot keep them in books!

They made a big timeline showing all the events leading up to the Revolution. 

It’s pretty fun, so
Here it is up close:

The French and Indian War

The Boston Massacre

Paul Revere’s Ride

The Battles of Lexington

and Concord (the North Bridge)

The Battle of Bunker Hill- “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!”  The boys thought this was the coolest thing ever said.  That, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”

And..

The Declaration of Independence
Note the biggest signature of John Hancock.  Also something they thought was very cool.  Reagan especially liked the idea of being a big time rebel.  Go figure.

So then it was off to Boston.  I had carefully planned out what we would see each day in what order so as to stay true to the history timeline.  Of course those plans went out the window pretty early on.  Between traffic, sight closing times and the occasional “I have to go to the bathroom but mom and dad can’t find a bathroom in suburban Connecticut” our well laid plans had to be totally changed just about every day.  Here’s what it looked like:

Day 1: Drive to Plymouth, then go to the hotel.  Drive to Lexington, then  the hotel.  (Plymouth was 5 hours away and when we realized we weren’t going to make it before it closed we had to head change course and then only had time for Lexington)

We managed to get to the Minute Man National Park in time to pick up these awesome souvenirs and walk along the path that Paul Revere took on his midnight ride. 

He’ll grow into it.

Shooting the Redcoats on the Battle road as they ran away from the Colonists.  (Reagan’s favorite part of the whole war)

 
More along the battle road, path of Paul Revere’s ride
They were very excited to be retracing Revere’s steps.  Of course I was more excited than all of them put together, but that’s beside the point.

They were dutifully respectful when we found this grave marker for two British soldiers.

Ok, really this was their first reaction:
 

Reenacting Paul Revere’s arrest right where it happened!!!  I’m sorry, this was just so cool to me.  I know some of you are just snoring, but I can’t tell you how exciting it was for me to see these places!  In his journal Reagan titled this one, “Paul Reveagan”

And then it was too dark to do anything else, so we found a Mexican restaurant to celebrate Reagan’s real 9th birthday.
I don’t know which he was more excited about, the gun or the sombrero.

Stay tuned for part II!

An earthquake and a hurricane were not enough. Nature had more fun planned for us lowly Easterners; a very early snowstorm on full leafy trees. Not a happy combo.

We managed to get our pumpkins carved just a few days before the storm hit.

I’ve talked myself out of buying those fancy pumpkin carving kits for years now and I finally gave in this year and it was the fastest, easiest and safest pumpkin carving EVER! I highly recommend them.

Here are the finished products of this year’s pumpkin fest

We also managed to get our pumpkin cookies decorated…

Little miss snitching a cookie. She took a bite before I could put the camera down.

We lit our jack-o-lanterns for ONE night and the next day it snowed 6 inches…..
took down tons of branches from most trees in our area, and knocked out power to 3 million people on the East Coast. It looked like a war zone and sounded like one too as all the tree limbs snapped and trees toppled. There were power lines down everywhere, branches and trees fell all over the roads. I wish I had gotten some pictures. The night of the storm Rock went out to do some work and couldn’t even get home there was so much debris on the roads. He had to walk the last 1/2 mile home. Thus began our 5 days without power. We were ready for a power outage back in August with the hurricane but the cold made things pretty miserable after a while.

On the first day without power, Levi snuck upstairs with the cocoa container and failed to get it back down the stairs full.

When this happened I was upset, but reasonably calm, thinking, “Hey, the vacuum will take care of this!” I then walked all the way over to the closet, hauled the vacuum up the stairs and was about to plug it into the outlet before I remembered, “DUH! WE HAVE NO POWER!” Then I was no longer reasonably calm. I still don’t think we’ve gotten it all out of the carpet.
That night when it got dark, Liberty was a little tentative about all the dark rooms. She would walk over to the dinning room and just stand in the entry way and peer into the darkness. You could see the wheels turning in her head. “Hmm, I know something is different here… can’t put my finger on it, though.” But after a day or so she was very comfortable just toddling into a room even if there was no light.

On the second day of no power we had pancakes and eggs on our Coleman stove for breakfast. Yummy! They canceled church so rather than listening to the kids run wild in the house all day we piled them in the warm car and drove all the way south of Trenton (1.5 hours away) to buy the first generator we could find. We decided that after 3 major windstorms in just 10 years we finally needed to invest in one.
Here we are piled into the van all cozy warm with our DVD player and generator.

Thanks to the generator we now had one small, warm, lit room, a working sump pump, freezer and fridge for the rest of the outage. Our house was still freezing, though, and we spent the next five days in our long underwear.

On day 3 I slipped on the basement stairs and hurt my tailbone pretty bad. Rock took pity on me and stayed home from work to help with the kids. And Halloween was postponed! since no one had power. The kids were very bummed about that. We did eventually get to go trick or treating a week late. I’ll post some pictures here soon of those.

On day 4 I attempted to homeschool and gave up after about an hour because we were all cold and none of us were really in the mood. Telling them that Abraham Lincoln learned to read without electricity didn’t seem to inspire them much and I was still in a lot of pain anyway. If it hadn’t hurt to sit I would have just read them stories all day long-they would have loved that. That afternoon my sainted visiting teacher, who had finally gotten power back, took all 4 kids to her house for a while to play.

On day 5 I was beginning to lose my mind. It really wasn’t that bad so I’m not sure why it was so hard mentally and emotionally, but it was. We were all going stir crazy I guess. The neighborhood rumble of generators was deafening, I was tired of being cold and I just wanted a light switch to work! Oh, and I wanted to be able to sleep through the night instead of being waked up every single night by one child or another because their flashlight batteries had died and they were in the pitch black. It is VERY cold at night in a house with no power and getting out of bed twice a night was getting very old! They had finally been told that on pain of death did they wake me up. They were to just close their eyes and think happy thoughts! Note to self: Buy WAY more D batteries than you think you need next time!

Just as I was separating the laundry to do at a friend’s house the lights miraculously came on. It was a miracle. Electricity IS a miracle. We use miraculous inventions every day and we take these little miracles for granted! I have now been thoroughly chastened for my ingratitude! I was almost in tears I was so relieved! I started jumping up and down and clapping and cheering and Libby thought I had lost my mind. I was so thrilled that to celebrate I made everyone’s favorite chicken noodle casserole and homemade bread-in the OVEN! Nothing has ever tasted so good. And we are all, even Levi, STILL thanking Heavenly Father for the electricity.