Boston Times

Hi friends and family!  This is going to be a long post.  It has been a long week and a wonderful weekend!!

Rich and I were able to enjoy lunch together this past Monday.  I think I've mentioned before that on occasion Rich can work from home (I'm hoping that I will eventually be able to as well).  He spent the morning at home working, but because he was home Bilbo wasn't cooped up in his crate.  (I make sound bad like he's cooped up all day...but he's not.  He gets exercise in the morning before we leave and then again at lunch....and he loves sleeping so it's not all bad).

Sometimes he cuddles and it's the most adorable thing in the world.  In this picture he was actually trying to get away a little bit....he slowly inches closer to the edge of the couch and then slinks off like molasses dripping from a jar.  His eyes are slightly alien because of the flash...but he's just a sweet cuddle pup.

For about the past month I've been helping out the Carringtons in the ward with getting their kids out the door in the morngings.  Patricia and Ryan leave for work around 7:45 and then I've been in charge of getting their younger two out the door and off to school.  But I had to stop because doing that because of my promotion.  So this past week was my last week - it has been tricky/exhausting waking up extra early to go help out (fortunately they also live in Wilton, only about 5 minutes away), but it was still hard to quit!  On my last day, the weather was beautiful so before heading down to the bus stop we playing on the swingset.

Charlotte is in first grade and Brooks goes to day school, he turns 4 this week!  I have LOVED working with them and their parents - they are some of the sweetest people in the ward!  And their kid are so great!  They have another, Sophia who goes to a private school and leaves earlier than these two sweeties! (Btw...it's a lot harder to take a photo of swinging children than I thought - kudos parents!)

We also decided to SWITCH to SPRINT this week!  They were offering half the price of AT&T...which isn't as great as it sounds.  We're only going to end up saving about 25-30$ as opposed to AT&T (what I grew up using).  It took a few weeks of research...but we have finally made the switch.  We're also switching to iPhone SE phones - so those with iPhones - please reassure us that we're making the right choice!  My brother assured me that he'd disown me as his sister if I ever switched to an iPhone....so hopefully he isn't reading this! :/  

Rich is getting silver and I am getting gold. (click please...I literally used to sing that song every time I saw things that were silver and gold when I was a kid....right parents?)

With a new phone comes a new phone case - there's a woman on Etsy who makes phone cases with REAL pressed flowers in them!  Which one should I get?  I think that having real flowers is just so unique!  She's getting so talented!  Check out her shop and help me decide (the iphone I'm ordering is gold, and I think the pink flowers would compliment it)

ShopOhMyGoodies

So that was our "mid-week" excitement.  I know that I mentioned in my blog last week that the weather was disgustingly rainy and it was for sure, but it has made me more appreciate the weather this week.  It's been beautiful!  Bilbo has spent much more time outdoors and so have we!  I think I even wore shorts earlier this week!  While we were at Cranbury park with Bilbo after work on Monday or Tuesday we came across some "dog watcher" ads.  There was one for DogVacay.com and we are SO GLAD we discovered that!  It's this great website where you can find dog watchers for VERY REASONABLE PRICES!  It's SOOOO much cheaper than boarding and we only had to drive into Norwalk to find someone willing to watch Bilbo.  It's actually way cool - if you're reading this and you have a dog and can't find anyone to watch your dog...go to that website!  You will not be disappointed!  It took off a lot of stress knowing that he was with someone who loves him and was willing to be with him all day, while we went to go have fun.

Let's just fast forward to the weekend and get to the good stuff, shall we?  

BOSTON.

MASSACHUSETTS!

Groupon is pretty amazing.  If you don't use it...you should.  We also used an app called "best parking" which really helped us out.  We were able to drive right into Boston and we found a parking garage that only charged 9$ for the whole day.

We took a hop-on hop-off trolley tour of the city, and that was lots of fun!  Our tour guide was this quirky, hilarious old guy with a very thick Boston accent (get in the cah, and latha it up with butta' kind of accent...).  As he was driving through town we learned a lot about Boston and how a lot of the streets that we were driving on were once....shoreline or ocean.  We drove along a street called "Atlantic" and he explained it's called that because it used to be the Atlantic ocean.

Here are some pictures that are in no particular order...but most of which were taken on the trolley tour.

The Garden...home of the Boston Celtics (barf <----Rich hates them...I have no particular opinion except to support his dislike for them).  And Also the Boston Bruins.  The triangular thing next to it is a bridge that is actually very cool looking.

And this picture was taken by none other than yours truly, Richard Wilkins.  The building has some kind of photoshop-esque glow behind it...but it was just taken on Rich's phone.  Do I know what building this is?  I'm ashamed to say no.  Our tour guide told us about it...but I don't remember.  You can see some white tents set up...there was an arts festival going on.  It was kind of like Freedom or Fiesta days where people set up booths and sell stuff...nothing was that good, we perused but didn't find any treasures.

This is the Holocaust Memorial of Boston.  The tour guide told us that there are 5 towers, all built to resemble smoke stacks.  Engraved on the glass are the numbers of each person who were forced into the death camps.  At the bottom of each stack is a grate with tiny lights below it...steam comes up at your feet to simulate gas chambers.  It was a pretty impressive memorial.

The three above pictures are all of the Boston Harbor, which apparently back in the day had a lot of pirate activity!  A lot of sailors were kidnapped from port Boston and turned into pirates!

This sculpture...I believe is a memorial to civil war soldiers - it honors the largely African American civil war regimen at the Boston Common (the Boston equivalent of Central Park).  If you look closely at the soldiers, you can tell they are African American.

Of course there is a lot of American history in Boston.  We were able to visit the Boston Tea Party gift shop and see the ship from the dock.  This ship was just a replica.  We learned however that the party who dumped all the spoiled tea into the sea dressed as Indians not as a disguise, but as a statement - they saw the Indians as a "free people", who were completely separate from England/Britain as they had never been a part of that country.

There she be.  If you look close, you can see there are people on it.  They were doing some kind of reenactment with tourists - there was a man dressed in colonial clothing screaming something and then the people would say "AY!" afterward!  Then they dumped pretend tea into the water.  haha.  We didn't do it because one of us was sleepy (it wasn't me) and because it cost money to do it.

Partyin' like the Bostonians did back in the 1700s!

At the souvenir shop I actually bought a small box of herbal tea.  I grew up drinking it and knew I wanted to buy a little bit - most of it was black/green tea, some of them were even 1700s blends - which would have been fun to try.  I had to do a little digging to make sure that I didn't buy any tea that was against the W.O.W.  So I found a tiny box of Chamomile/Almond which I look forward to trying.

While I was looking for the perfect souvenir we found these colonial hats, Rich refused to have a picture so here's another one of me.

This statue of Samuel Adams was right outside the Boston Tea Party gift shop.  Naturally...I need a picture!

As an additional souvenir, I bought a deck of cards to add to my collection.  They just say "BOSTON - I squeezed it all in" on them.  Which...we certainly didn't squeeze it all in...but I think we'll be back, we loved it a lot.  I think we liked it best out of all the places we went!  :)  It has an EXTREMELY European feel to it, and in some places we explored I felt like I WAS back in Europe.  Our tour guide told us that certain parts of the town were settled by Italians and the Irish.  There's a few streets in town that are actually called "Little Italy" - it had like 1,000 Italian restaurants (not really...but there were a lot).  I totally felt like I was back in Italy and told Rich he no longer needs to see Europe because Boston basically is.

This was taken from the tour bus obviously - but you can see the street - the tour guide kept saying how beautiful Little Italy is.  He said "this street is so gorgeous that they should CHAWWWGE people for walkin' down it!"

 This, again....super European/Italian.  This actually Hanover Street (I think) the same street that Paul Revere's home is on.

Little Italy.

We stopped at some dessert restaurants (which took only cash...lame....c'mon Italian Americans....this is the 21st century...get some card machines in your joint....just cuz this is Boston doesn't mean like  you have to live like it's still 1775....) to get some snacks.  I had some gelato - pistachio mixed with hazelnut - SOOOOOO AMAZING!!!!!!  Authentic Gelato is pretty much the best treat that there is!

Rich got an eclair at this cute pastry shop called "Modern Pastry Shop" (again...only took cash for some reason).  I thought the packaging was so cute that I had to take a pic! I was going to keep that front cover part and frame...but then the chocolate stained it....so I guess we just have to go again!

Before we got treats we went and visited the Old North Church - the famous one.  Paul Revere put lanterns in the top to warn of the coming of the British soldiers...."one if by land...two if by sea".  It still stands today - and I think they still have church there on Sunday!

These are pictures of Paul Revere's home.  He lived here while working as both a blacksmith and a dentist.  He used to make false teeth out of hippopotamus teeth.

This was after it had "closed" for the day, or else we could have gone inside.  The first floor windows were open as well when it was open for tourists...we found it right as they were shutting them.

My shirt happened to be basically the exact color of the paint on Paul's house.

This was a little (and by little I mean taller than me) plaque thingy set up across from Paul Revere's home.  It was by the square across from his house.

So there was this splash pad near the harbor that had a circle of sculpture heads that represented the different animals of the Chinese new year.  Our tour guided pointed out how intricate and elaborate the dragon head one was, we saw some guy taking a picture of his girlfriend by the dragon head so of course we had to follow suit.  (this was taken before we even went to the Boston Tea Party ship fyi)  You can see that the children were having a hayday in the water behind us - it was a beautiful day to be in Boston and we actually got a little toasty ourselves.

We decided to meet up with Rich's old roommate Benjamin Harrison, who happens to live in Boston.  While we were waiting to meet up with him we went strolling about the downtown and came across this magical place near the Quincy Market (America's first shopping mall).  We went inside and looked around....they even had Christmas music playing!  

After having a little taste of the holidays mid May, we met up with Benjamin, who treated us to "Saus" - a beer and burger place with some seriously impressive sauces (hence the name).  It was super fun to meet him and see he and Rich reminisce over the good times they'd had as roommates and just catch up over dinner.

After we ate and talked for a while, we walked across the street to the holocaust memorial.  The sun had gone down and so it was all lit up.  Benjamin was actually the one who told us about the steam...it provided an interesting effect - it was warm on my feet, but surely the feeling was chilling for those who lost their lives in the death camps.

You can't really see the steam, but you can see the stars below.  It was beautiful.  

I noticed Primo Levi right away - I could perhaps be related to him!  You can see the numbers engraved on the glass behind Primo's name.

Anyway....that was our Boston trip.  It was TONS of fun.  We got back to Wilton with Bilbo at about midnight.  We had a blast!!  If you haven't gone - I recommend it!!

Today at church, Rich and I had the "opportunity" to sit in sharing time with the Junior Primary.  I don't think I've sat in Junior Primary since being IN Junior Primary - same with Rich.  I was sitting next to a little Kindergarten aged boy who kept leaning his head on me like he was tired.  His name was Duke and he was adorably spacey!  Rich was sitting next to some boys who were a little older, but had this one little rowdy boy near him to who was bothering everyone around him.  During the closing prayer he knocked down some chairs!  haha!  Rich was telling me how surprised he was at how often children fall out of their chairs and are totally fine afterwards!  I didn't notice a lot of the things he did because I'm used to the way kids act - but to him he was blown away and slightly exhausted at how crazy little kids are!!  There was one little kid who kept blowing spit bubbles throughout all of the the meeting - we were asked to help out because their teachers all had a meeting during that hour.

I also got a calling - VT supervisor.  I've had this calling before in a singles ward, so hopefully it won't be too different.  I was hoping to get a calling in Primary - but for now it's probably best that we don't work in Primary so that we can get the chance to get to know other ward members.

After church we took some seriously long naps (Boston is fun and exhausting...and 9 o'clock church is hard....so waking up for church is sometimes extremely hard for us).  I made "Crack Cauliflower" with dinner, so here's the recipe for anyone who is interested in making it!  It was super yummy and tasted kinda like chicken!  It will be one that I make again for SURE!

After dinner we took Bilbo out to Merwin Meadows for a quick play.  He got wet (there's an irresistable pond there) and so these are the post play pictures of our puppy (notice my alliteration).

He LOVES getting towel dried. It makes him SO happy for some reason.  I think he likes the roughness of it.  

I ALMOST FORGOT!  When we were outside Quincy Market, there was this 13-year-old kid who is probably the most talented individual I've EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!!!!  He's going to be on The Voice in a few years - guaranteed!  But he was SO CRAZY AMAZING at the piano - I couldn't resist making a few videos!!  Enjoy, and happy happy week!!