No ducks for you!
Finally, my last recap of Boston!
Isaac's best homegirl Ella was born in Boston, so perhaps by some stretch of the word could be called a native. When she learned that we would be visiting the city of her birth, she and her mom conspired to give Isaac the 1940s Robert McCloskey book Make Way for Ducklings for his birthday. The boys really dug it, but I became a wee bit obsessed with it. We could actually visit some of the places mentioned in the book! How cool is that? (Two out of two O'Neal boys agree: yes, mommy, perhaps it is cool)
Friday was our last day in Boston, one fraught with conferencing for the Daddy-person. I vowed that the boys and I would use our time alone to hoof it 5 blocks or so to the Boston Public Gardens...
...because it was in there that we could see specific scenes we had read about in our McCloskey-authored Boston Preschool Travel Guide. There turned out to be some serious glitches in the plan as it corresponds to modern-day April. We watched Mr. and Mrs. Mallard swimming in the pond...
...but we were expressly forbidden from tossing them peanuts to eat, as was done in the book.
We saw the cute "island" where they made their home...
...but couldn't ride around it ourselves in those magnificent swan boats. They didn't start running for the season until, oh, THE VERY NEXT DAY. Poop on that.
I learned from a travel book (thanks, Sarah!) that there was also a statue of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings on the sidewalk somewhere, and that Mrs. Mallard's head was kept highly polished by the bazillions of kids who sat on her to pose for a picture. Because of some extensive landscaping going on at the time, this is as close as we could get. I mean, come ON!
Oh well. Even if we didn't get to feed the ducks, we did enjoy a lovely snack of our own by the lake, bought from a local grocer at the park's corner.
And Boston Common, right next door, was much kinder to us. We ran laps around some monuments:
And they had a playground there! Nestled right in the middle of the bustling city, it was.
After all that, we were pooped and ready to go home. Being that it was Friday afternoon on I-95, it would take us 9-1/2 hours (versus the less-than-6 it took to get there) before we were back in our very own driveway. Daddy calculated at one rest stop that we had driven 45 miles in 3 hours. All that mwah-ing I felt about New York on the way there? I TAKE IT BACK.
Isaac's best homegirl Ella was born in Boston, so perhaps by some stretch of the word could be called a native. When she learned that we would be visiting the city of her birth, she and her mom conspired to give Isaac the 1940s Robert McCloskey book Make Way for Ducklings for his birthday. The boys really dug it, but I became a wee bit obsessed with it. We could actually visit some of the places mentioned in the book! How cool is that? (Two out of two O'Neal boys agree: yes, mommy, perhaps it is cool)
Friday was our last day in Boston, one fraught with conferencing for the Daddy-person. I vowed that the boys and I would use our time alone to hoof it 5 blocks or so to the Boston Public Gardens...
...because it was in there that we could see specific scenes we had read about in our McCloskey-authored Boston Preschool Travel Guide. There turned out to be some serious glitches in the plan as it corresponds to modern-day April. We watched Mr. and Mrs. Mallard swimming in the pond...
...but we were expressly forbidden from tossing them peanuts to eat, as was done in the book.
We saw the cute "island" where they made their home...
...but couldn't ride around it ourselves in those magnificent swan boats. They didn't start running for the season until, oh, THE VERY NEXT DAY. Poop on that.
I learned from a travel book (thanks, Sarah!) that there was also a statue of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings on the sidewalk somewhere, and that Mrs. Mallard's head was kept highly polished by the bazillions of kids who sat on her to pose for a picture. Because of some extensive landscaping going on at the time, this is as close as we could get. I mean, come ON!
Oh well. Even if we didn't get to feed the ducks, we did enjoy a lovely snack of our own by the lake, bought from a local grocer at the park's corner.
And Boston Common, right next door, was much kinder to us. We ran laps around some monuments:
And they had a playground there! Nestled right in the middle of the bustling city, it was.
After all that, we were pooped and ready to go home. Being that it was Friday afternoon on I-95, it would take us 9-1/2 hours (versus the less-than-6 it took to get there) before we were back in our very own driveway. Daddy calculated at one rest stop that we had driven 45 miles in 3 hours. All that mwah-ing I felt about New York on the way there? I TAKE IT BACK.
posted by Claire at 3:30 PM
2 Comments:
i love the pic of them on the bench. mad props.
What a cool thing to do! Follow out what the McCloskey book talked about! You are such a great Mommy! What a great idea! I'll bet the boys were excited to see things ACTUALLY come to life like in a story!
Meemaw is AWESTRUCK by your literary-to-life adventures! Wish I could've been there! How fun!
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