Activities!

Today we had a very fun day of ACTIVITIES! We started out with a morning in Lexington, our fancy-schmancy city-next-door. We went to a very fun fair for kids at the Lexington Community Nursery School. There were games (with PRIZES -- a very exciting feature for Lucy) and a petting zoo and a bouncy house and all those sorts of things. The school is very very nice, but a bit too far away for us to really consider. But Lucy had a grand time winning at games like the bean bag toss, golf, croquet, and also the "wishing well" where kids tell the teen-kids running the wishing well which prize they want, then they get it. Nice.



After the fair (believe me, it was difficult to pull her away!), we went for lunch at Bertucci's. We tried to do a different local pizza place (Upper Crust) but sadly, they had nothing other than pizza, and we have a Very Picky Eater in the family (Lucy). Blargh. So we ended up at Bertucci's, which has pasta in butter. Also, they give the kids not just the regular set of crayons and an activity page: they gave her a piece of pizza dough! Genius! She very much enjoyed that, although not as much as the Hoodsie cup she got for dessert. In case you are not familiar with the concept of "Hoodsie cup," it is likely that you have seen such a thing in your life and called it a "Dixie cup," which is a little plastic thingie filled with ice cream -- in this case, chocolate and vanilla. They're called "hoodsie cups" around here because "Hood" is the major brand of milk, thus their ice cream cups are "hoodsie cups."



We ended up skipping the nap completely, as today was the first Saturday of the month, and as with most first Saturdays, it was Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios, and Lucy LOVES going there. So we spent the afternoon looking at art, talking to artists, meeting a bunch of lovely artist dogs (several of the artists have well-behaved, mellow dogs who hang out with them in their studios), and of course, hunting down candy. This is Lucy's favorite part of going to the studios, much to my chagrin. But we had a nice time and even found ourselves a new babysitter! Woo hoo!



In other news, we've been eating lots of delicious things. Jake picked a bunch of our rhubarb and made some up to go along with the panna cotta he made:





It was delicious! While I was off in Boston for a conference, I went out with some friends to a fabulous fancy restaurant called Menton, which was incredible. I am VERY sorry that Jake didn't join us (I owe him a visit there now!).



We've been slowly working on some small-scale home improvements, particularly in the yard. I finally got around to staining our new railing on the steps to the garden. We had had so much rain for so long that I had to wait a while for things to dry out.





I also stained a climbing ladder for the clematis,





And I painted a few replacement pickets for pieces on the fence that had fallen apart.



The gate kind of looks like it's missing some teeth:



Jake will be installing them tomorrow. Hopefully I can do an update then. I should do a garden update, too. But this is all for now.