Wow! I am really quite behind on posting!

Check out some of our photos from a Daddy Day adventure we took back in April (click on the photo to the right to see them all). Sheesh! Where does the time go?

We walked to the Seaport District from our house on this trip and Caleb started asking me to take his photograph in various spots. I think the red Ferrari kicked off the trend (I asked him if he wanted a shot of it with him in front and he said yes, of course) but it was fun taking photos of him. He asked if I wanted a photograph of myself a few times, so some of the shots in there are his. Good times.

Boy am I glad we left yesterday evening instead of trying to stick it out last night. It is sunny and beautiful in Boston (and our tent is finally dry — it’s been hanging in the shower since last night) but not so much in Bear Brook State Park. Here’s the hour-by-hour weather forecast:

If you like falafal, and even if you do not, I highly recommend that you stop by the Falafal Palace in Central Square. I had my first experience a few weeks ago with some friends and had been itching to take Megan and Caleb for a tasting ever since. I remembered the place being called the “Falafal King” — hence the title — and had been rambling about it for days to Megan and Caleb. (As an aside, when we popped out of the subway station and made our way to the street, the first thing Caleb said was, “Where is the Falafal King?” Click here, or on the photo, to see more of our trip!)

I guess I couldn’t wait until all three of us could make the trip as I decided Daddy Day was as long as I could wait. So sans Megan, Caleb and I ventured over on the Red Line to see if the sandwich was as good the second time around. He liked it a lot, though it was a bit messy to share. …I definitely think we’ll need to bring Megan next time and see if the third visit is just as good as the first or second.

After our fantastic lunch, Caleb and I roamed around Central Square for a bit. Probably my favorite part of the trip is when we took a detour through a book store. Caleb plopped down at a table to read a book but then decided that he should help me find a gift for Megan (her birthday is coming up!). We wandered through the shelves and he would point out books that he wanted to get for her. We settled on having him pick out a card and he nabbed one of the coolest birthday cards I have seen in a while (let’s just say it is a postcard and a rather random one at that).

All in all, full on fantastic falafal, we had a great Daddy Day.

If you know me well enough or have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am not too fond of strollers. …so if you catch me using one, something is up. (I broke down and agreed to bring one on our recent trip to Mexico and am more or less glad that we did. Rolling Caleb around the airport was pretty much the only way to get him to fall asleep!)

I am pretty sure these photos are from last weekend, or perhaps the weekend before (click on the photo, or here, to see more!). I wasn’t feeling great and Caleb was sick as well — he had a runny nose, a cough, and just wasn’t acting like his normal chipper self. We wanted to head outside for an adventure and my biggest priority was making sure he was as warm as possible. So, without much hesitation, I opted to strap him in the stroller and zip him into his mobile sleeping bag (I’m sure it’s called something else).

My constant prodding of, “Are you warm or cold?” seemed to annoy him — he more or less said he was warm every time, no matter how few blocks passed between my interrogations. He also seemed quite content getting the front seat for once, rather than riding on my shoulders or up front, cradled like a sack of potatoes (that weigh as much as an almost 3-year old, I guess). Even so, and despite the nipping wind, he would ask to get out every time I stopped the stroller. So I kept walking.

I must say, covering 2-3 miles pushing a stroller is easier on the back and shoulders than covering the same with your son bopping up and down in the thinner altitude just above your head. That said, I noticed that it was much harder to talk to him when he was below and in front of me, and certainly over the constant grinding of the stroller wheels on concrete, asphalt, dirt and ice.

While our adventures are a reason to be out and about having fun, I think I enjoy most simply walking around with Caleb, having him point things out (his arm jutting over my head, finger stiffly marking something with its posture), and talking endlessly. When my back and shoulders start to hurt too much to keep him up top, I shift him down to my front, almost like a backwards piggy-back ride where he faces in. In this position, I tend to sing to him when we aren’t chatting. In fact, I guess I sing to him a lot when he is like that, and probably enjoy those moments the most.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that even though I felt as if I only walked a few miles (rather than hiking several times more with a full pack on my back), I enjoyed our stroller ride far less than most of our more “huddled” adventures.

…seems logical to me. At least until he’s bigger than me, I suppose…

Here are some photos from our trip to Chinatown yesterday (click on the image below, or click here).

I wrote about our recent trip to the Museum of Science earlier, but here are a few photos to peruse (click on the image below, or click here):

Traveling back in time to a month ago (November 9th, to be exact — I’m still making catch-up posts), Caleb, Megan and I found ourselves in the middle of Manhattan (click here, or on the photo to the right for more photos!). We left Connecticut earlier that morning (where we stayed for my grandfather’s funeral the day before…which took place in New York…just bear with me…) and decided to make a pit-stop in Manhattan on our way to Albany, where we would spend the night (yes, Manhattan IS on the way to Albany from south-western Connecticut — you just have to imagine that you are driving in a boomerang, more or less). We have a few friends that work and/or live in the city and thought it would be nice to try see them, especially given how rarely we have an opportunity to make it out with Caleb.

We arrived around 11am and had decided somewhere along the 95 that we would make the Natural History Museum our home base. We figured that there would be parking there, and if we couldn’t arrange to see any of our friends, we could always have a blast at the museum. We ended up finding a random parking spot on the street a block and a half away from the museum but ended up spending only five or so minutes in the area. In short, it was quite busy, and we managed to connect with our friends Nora and Amy, and wanted to prioritize spending time with them.

Nora works near Rockefeller Center, so we zig-zagged through Central Park and made a pit stop in a diner before meeting up with her. (As an aside, salad, a tuna sandwich, a grilled cheese sandwich, and an orange juice set us back over $60…cheap, Manhattan is not.) On full stomachs, we met Nora for coffee and hot chocolates and had a great time catching up. We parted ways and took the subway to SOHO where our friend Amy works (no, not a single person offered Caleb and me their seat despite the fact that I had to dig my fingernails into the wall to keep from falling over while holding him) and had a great time hanging out with her in the photography studio she manages. A long subway ride back uptown to our car and we found ourselves stuck in traffic for a few hours trying to leave Manhattan during rush hour on a Friday. Sweet.

It was a great afternoon and we are very happy to have had the chance to spend it with Nora and Amy!

Ahhhh, there’s nothing like taking a lazy nap in the grass on a hot summer day. Nothing, that is, except for having to take a nap because your toddler is pooped, you have no car, and you have no idea where your hotel is located.

Enter our weekend…

I’ll write more about our interesting weekend trip to Cape Cod in a bit (let’s just say it started out with a giant spider, a few hotel shenanigans, and ended with a bit of off-road driving in a station wagon) but wanted to post the video below before I head to bed.

The short story is that we were in Cape Cod for the weekend because Megan had a wedding to photograph on Saturday afternoon and evening. Not to get too much into the story, but we ended up in a different town than we originally intended to hang out in and Megan had to drop Caleb and I off for the afternoon and drive back up the cape to where her wedding was taking place. We decided that we should part ways at a beach in Hyannis (where our third hotel in less than 24 hours was located) with Megan taking the car and Caleb and I relying on our legs and our trusty adventure backpack to have some fun and then make our way to our hotel for an afternoon nap.

Suffice it to say, we had a great time at the beach and let the afternoon get away from us — we started walking back to the hotel and didn’t make it more than a mile before Caleb started nodding off! Unable to carry him very well while he is asleep (if you don’t already know this about me, I more or less shun strollers) I decided that I pretty much had to find a place to park for a bit and let him take a nap. I chose a grassy hillside in the shade and more or less propped myself back against my backpack in a half sitting half lying position with Caleb sprawled against my chest (check out the photo below!).

He slept like a log despite all of my shifting around ( I realized that the grass was wet and put my hands under my back to keep my bottom and back dry — a great, but very uncomfortable solution over 45 minutes) and the intermittent traffic noise. There was also a bus idling the entire time (waste gas much?) in a parking lot nearby though I imagine that helped Caleb sleep more than anything. I took the video below just as Caleb woke up. My favorite part is when he tried to lie down again and bonked into the camera!

Perhaps I haven’t posted much recently because I am still recovering from the trip Caleb and I took to Harvard Square. The trip was two weeks ago and a lot of fun. We set out from our house in the North End to walk to the Charles River and see where we wanted to go from there. (Click on the image to the right to check out the slide show!)

Once we made it to the Charles, we decided to walk over the Longfellow Bridge. Cambridge is on the other side of the river, with MIT’s campus sitting just a few blocks in from the river. One of the main stops on the Red Line between Harvard and Boston is Kendall Square (a central location at MIT) so I figured that might be a good place to stop our trek and take the subway back to Boston. While we were in Kendall Square, though, Caleb gave no indication that he wanted to head on. …so we continued our trek.

I decided to stick to a walking route that would keep us close to where the Red Line stopped so we would have easy access if we decided to head home. Accordingly, the next stop was Central Square, a part of Cambridge I had yet to explore, though one I had heard quite a lot about (there are a lot of photos in the slide show of Central Square — it has a lot of character and feels like a completely different city).

Central Square is phenomenal — it’s an amalgamation of cultures, visual overload, and sights and sounds galore — but again, not where we wanted to end our journey. So we continued on…

Harvard Square (wow, that’s a lot of squares for one day!) was the next stop on our Red Line-adjacent journey, and finally felt like the destination for Caleb and I to take a breather and begin to head home. We walked around for a bit and stopped only to grab a few burritos for dinner. (As an aside, if you haven’t been to a Boloco, Caleb and I highly recommend the Summer burrito with tofu. The enthusiasm is not at the same level for the peanut butter and jelly log wrapped in a tortilla…)

When we finally decided to head home on the subway, something made us get out off at the Park Street station (at the corner of Boston Common) rather than transfer to a Green Line train that would drop us just outside of the North End. The sun was setting when we made our way outside of the station and bathed the buildings around the park in the most beautiful light. The day was too beautiful to head home right away so we kept walking and headed east to the Seaport District, stopping a few steps short at South Station.

We contemplated continuing on at that point but decided to start heading home. The sun was just about to set completely, and I should have started Caleb’s bedtime process about an hour earlier. Satisfied with our journey, we walked along Atlantic up to the North End and headed home. All-in, we walked about six and a half miles, though Caleb spent much of that distance perched up on my shoulders. For the adventurous, I would certainly recommend the same route for a day trip that offers a lot of variety in one trip.

I am very behind in my posting. I packed the photographs full of descriptions and will let them do the talking. Click on the image below to check out the images and read about our adventure. As a brief intro, we spent most of Saturday holed away in the house, and randomly decided to head out for a walking trip around 4pm. Somehow we wandered to the South End and made it back home about four and a half hours later. It was a great trip. Enjoy!