Picket Fence Post

It’s school vacation week around the Picket Fence Post house and we’ve been trying to keep them there kid folk busy and, preferably, very, very tired.

Patriot’s Day: In our attempts to keep the children in a continual state of fatigue, The Spouse took The Youngest Boy to watch the re-enactment of the Battle on Lexington Green on Patriot’s Day on Monday. (The Girl was recovering from a cold — and a bitterly freezing game in the driving rain Saturday morning didn’t help matters — and The Boy was too damned lazy to get up early, so I stayed home with them and missed the whole, glorious event, much to my chagrin. Seriously.)

Attending this event, and getting there in time to get a good spot, required that The Spouse and The Youngest Boy rise at 3 a.m. Yep. Three. A. M. They watched. They reveled. They had awesome French toast at a diner in Framingham later. Then my little Colonial Boy came home, smiling broadly, while wearing a new, black tri-cornered hat, which looked more convincing than the old one we have. (He already owns a fake cap gun/rifle thingy from a previous Patriot’s Day excursion and spent the rest of the day running around with his hat and fake rifle.)

As for the rest of us, The Girl and The Eldest Boy used a recipe they got from school — when the people from King Arthur flour came in and did a baking demonstration – and they made some awesome cinnamon rolls all by themselves. From scratch. Even cleaned up the kitchen afterward. (Mostly. Kind of.) Eating those rolls took the edge off the horrific Red Sox games as of late.

Scrabble/Bananagrams Tournament: When we weren’t groaning over horrendous Red Sox baseball (with the exception of the heroics of newcomer Darnell McDonald last night), we spent one evening matching wits with several rounds of Bananagrams (a word game that isn’t played on a board, has tiles but have no numbers assigned to letters) and then one big game of Scrabble that lasted until late into the evening (hoping it would, again, fatigue the children).

The Girl won both the Scrabble game and the Bananagrams tournament, winning a majority of the rounds. Not only did I award “prizes” (i.e. — off-beat candy) to the winners of both, but the person with the lowest Scrabble score, the highest scoring word, the best one-syllable word (in either game) and the one with the best, overall word got prizes too. In the end, the kids all wound up with some candy, loaded with sugar, which hyped them up, which went counter to our make-the-kids-tired venture.

Potterific: We’ve been getting very Potterific in the past few days as we’ve stepped up our project of reading the entire Harry Potter series aloud to The Youngest Boy by reading for long stretches at a time from the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. We finally celebrated finishing the second book (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) by watching the movie on Saturday night while nicknaming our 22-pound puppy Max, Fang, after Hagrid’s beast.

Basketball Hall of Fame: Today we briefly ventured to the western part of Massachusetts, to the city of Springfield, the birthplace of basketball. (Had to immediately skedaddle back home for an appointment so we couldn’t check in on the Picket Fence Post kids’ grandparents.)

When it came to touring through the Basketball Hall of Fame, The Spouse has very different ideas about how to go through a museum than do the kids and me. He tends to stop and read . . . EVERYTHING. At a glacial pace. I read, but not everything and only about items of interest, while drawing the kids’ attention to specific things.

The Girl and I, for example, scoped out the women-centric fare; she loved reading about Cheryl Miller scoring 105 points in a high school basketball game and Nancy Lieberman who was the first woman to play in a men’s league. While The Spouse was still reading, I brought the kids through the shrine to Michael Jordan, examinedall his championship rings through the Plexiglas, watched a brief movie, looked at a collection of his shoes (The Youngest Boy took lots of photos of the shoes) and read about his life story, where I made a big deal out of the fact that he got cut from his high school basketball team. The Girl and The Eldest Boy pretended to be sportscasters and read scripts from a teleprompter and saw a video playback, tested how high they could jump to get a rebound and each posed in front of a statue of Larry Bird acting like they were blocking his shot.

The downside of the visit: During the free shoot-around in the large gym, The Girl got hit in the nose by a basketball. And no, she didn’t pull a Marcia Brady, “Oh! My nose!” but I had to take her to the Subway restaurant, located in the same building, get a plastic bag, fill it with ice and nag her about keeping it on her nose. I’m hoping it doesn’t bruise, but at least it doesn’t look as bad as Marcia’s did.

Still on tap: We’re still planning on visiting the New England Aquarium in Boston, as well as making sure the boys get to their baseball/soccer practices. (The Girl’s practices are done for the week.) Maybe other stuff on the fly. Hopefully the Sox will be better. 

Image credit: Orlando Claffey/GateHouse News Service.

It’s been a long school spring vacation.

On Monday, The Spouse and I woke the three apples of our eyes up at the hideous hour of 3:45 a.m. in order to celebrate Patriots Day in Massachusetts. We packed everyone up and drove to the Lexington Green, the site of the Revolutionary War’s first exchange of musket fire. We thought we’d gotten there early enough to snag a good spot where we could get an unobstructed view of the green, but alas, we didn’t. We WERE able to see the colonists gather, the Sam Adams and Paul Revere impersonators dash away with a trunk of treasonous rebel papers and the British soldiers arrive and point their muskets. We heard the shots and muffled shouts, saw the cloud of smoke but didn’t see the actual skirmish. This greatly disappointed the children, especially the boys who bitterly said, “That wasn’t worth it!”  The disappointment continued later that morning when we watched the Boston Marathon on TV, rooted hard for the American runners, only to see them both wind up in a disappointing third place. I can’t remember what else happened that day as I was exhausted.

On Tuesday, the kids played outside together and bickered, then bickered some more. I think a neighbor kid (or kids) was over at our house at one point.  The Girl went to see the Hannah Montana movie with my sister-in-law that night, while The Spouse took the boys to see Monsters vs. Aliens and I logged some solid work time, alone.

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