Category Archives: Family

My sister stopped by on Monday with one of the twins, and she was all smiles.

Lori took our kids plus their cousin Ryan up north last week. Here are a couple of pics from a day they spent at Echo Lake. I love the pic of Carter and Ryan - but I really love the second pic! It looks like a Kung-Fu battle is about to go down!

Took a day off last week and went into downtown Newburyport to walk around. I've never been down there before - it's a nice spot. There were all kinds of sailboats in the harbor, and the buildings were the typical New England coastal city style - lots and lots of brick.

Lori and the kids went to visit a friend who was renting a house at the beach. The kids all worked together to bury Sean in the sand.

The kids and I tried geocaching for the first time today. If you haven't heard of it before, think of it as a real-life, GPS-based treasure hunt. People hide containers and post the GPS coordinates online. Your job is to find the container. They always contain a small log book you can sign, and sometimes they contain trinkets - if you take one, you leave one. The kids loved it - especially the part where the GPS tells you that you're in the right place and you have to start searching every nook and cranny in the area to find the container. We found four caches today, and the photo on the right shows the stuff we brought home from the caches we found. Hopefully the next people to find them like what we left ourselves! If you want to know more about it, here is the link to the main site: geocaching.com.

Dad and I took Carter to her first real concert last night - we saw Jake Shimabukuro at the Stockbridge Theater. This guy is phenomenal - he started playing when he was 4 (he's 36 now), and became famous by accident, essentially. Check out his wiki page to read the story. It was a great show last night - it was just Jake and a ukulele, blowing us away for two hours. He can make that thing do anything, from bluegrass, to flamenco, to classical music - at one point he even plugged into some effects pedals and pulled of some hard rock style, all-over-the -fretboard-at-lightning-speed craziness. Carter's eyes were as big as dinner plates half the time - and I'd have to admit my own probably were too. We got to meet him after the show, and I took Dad's picture with him. My only regret is that I didn't bring one of my ukuleles for him to sign! You'd better believe that I will next time, though!

We took the kids to their first real fireworks on Thursday night. They complained nonstop about the bugs - at least until the fireworks started. Once the show began they were laser-focused and awestruck. None of the pictures Lori took of the fireworks themselves came out, but I did find this Kodak moment tucked away on the camera.

Last weekend Lori, Carter, Grandma and Auntie Kathy all went up north for a girl's weekend. While up there they went to Storyland.