Of course, I packed up our giant bag full of “necessities,” and then had to leave them all in the car. Though she’s come a long way, Ellie is still not a reliable fan of the stroller, so this was an all-Ergo outing. While I technically had my hands free, I wasn’t going to use them to lug my DSLR around the orchard. Phone photos it is.

But, of course, I am a huge Instagram addict. If you’re not using it yet, I highly recommend downloading it. It’s free, the social aspect is fun but low-key and not really mandatory, and the photo effects (which you can preview before applying) are great. I personally love that you can use a photo you’ve already taken on your phone, in addition to using the in-app camera, so that you can just snap away and edit later.

Anyways, here’s our version of Apple Picking 2011, Instagram-Style.

For starters, it was upwards of 75 degrees with at least 85% humidity. While I’m glad it didn’t rain, as originally forecast, it wasn’t exactly your typical crisp Autumn day. It was hot and sweaty, and I’m already a hot and sweaty person to begin with, not to mention when carrying a hot and sweaty 7-month-old on my chest. Ew.

Undeterred, the kids immediately latched on to all of the “extra” things you could do at the farm. In previous years, we’d managed to dodge paying extra for the hay maze, the bounce house, and the pony rides with a bit of distraction. Not this time. Daniel fixed his attention on the lame yellow bounce castle, and was not going to miss it.  He dug the hay maze, too.

Rebecca’s laser-focus, on the other hand, was straight for the ponies. M chuckled to himself as he stood in line for well over half an hour with a dozen other dads and little girls, wondering where on earth the pony fascination comes from. I have no idea, but there it is.

Finally, we met up with M’s work-husband and his family, including their six-year-old girl who is much beloved by both of my kids. Though she and Becca may be a bit too similar… both very nice kids, but a little bossy and competitive. Still, it was mostly running and shrieking and laughing.

And this little friend of mine, so cranky on the drive that we stopped at Walgreens for some infant ibuprofen.  Calmer, less tooth pain, happier in the Ergo, where she napped a while and then took it all in. Talking in her sweet voice, “bah bah buh bah,” with the occasional growl, because that’s how she rolls. Sweet, sweet girl.

A few hours later, we were back at home. Fifteen pounds of apples, yay, but even better was all three happy kids. All of whom slept for more than two and a half hours at the same time. It was the holy grail of parenting young children.

My back has been in a bad way all week, so we decided to just rent a single kayak, and M would take turns paddling the kids around the pond.  The wind kicked up, and I can tell you that Daddy got his cardio and will be pretty sore in the morning.  But the kids were thrilled.

Daniel went first.

Rebecca waited patiently.

There was a passenger change at the dock, and each kid got their turn to go all the way out and around the island.

Not a bad way to spend one of the last warm afternoons of the year.

It’s been a long couple of weeks.  As the morning person in our relationship, I have always been the one who gets up with the kids. I’m pretty much on-duty by myself from the time they wake up until dinner.  Thankfully, M usually gets home for dinner time and does the vast majority of bath and bed by himself.  I’m grateful for that.  But still, the days can be long and repetitive.  At least on the weekend I usually have some sharing of responsibility, so I look forward to it.

The last two weekends, unfortunately, have not been so restful.  M was taking a professional development course that met Friday night (so no relief when I’m burnt out at the end of Friday) and all-day for two Saturdays in a row.  Did I mention that the kids take a parent/child swim class on Saturday mornings? Doing that by myself was nerve-wracking, to say the least, though they did well.  Plus, last weekend, my in-laws were in town.  And while that meant some extra hands and eyes, I don’t have to tell any of you about houseguests not being exactly relaxing.  This weekend, solo swimming again, followed by a birthday party.  Fun activities, but I’m damn tired.

So I really wanted my husband to just take care of the kids this morning so I could climb back into bed, and generally be off-duty for a little while.

He’s a good guy, of course, so he got his lazy butt out of bed and went downstairs.  The next thing I know, Rebecca is running back upstairs to me.

“Mommy, mommy! We’re going to go see Dora!”

Lord only knows what he Googled to arrive at this choice, but he discovered that the Nickelodeon Live stage show was in Boston, today is the last day, and there was a show in an hour and a half with tickets available.

I helped get the kids dressed and stocked the man bag with a potty and some snacks, and off they went.

My house is quiet.

I think that guy is a keeper.

I can complain about him sometimes, of course. His inability to wake up at a normal hour of the morning, for instance, will drive me nuts until the day I die. Everybody has their “thing” that bugs the shit out of their partner.  And when it comes to outings, sometimes I hate it that he seems to have no sense of timing, as far as how long it takes to get somewhere, how that fits into our schedule, and how long a shower he can take before I go stark raving mad.

But sometimes, man.  Sometimes he goes big. He wants to do something special and fun that the kids will love.  He doesn’t have as much experience going out solo with the kids as I do, of course. And he’s a worst-case-scenario worrywart by nature. So driving downtown and going to a theater by himself with two not-quite-three-year-olds makes him a little nervous.  But damn if he didn’t see my need for some quiet time and turn it into something great.

Anyways, when my turn came around, I took my first Isis class at their original center in Brookline, and it was Parenting Multiples (the class was so-so, but reports from other friends lead me to believe that it’s really awesome now).  I got my prenatal massage there.  And when my itty bitty babies were five weeks old, we started Great Beginnings, the very first in the mom/baby class series.

Oh, how I loved that class.  So much knowledge and comfort.  I loved our teacher, Carole, who had such a way with both the babies and the moms.  I loved our group, the fact that we all got along and that we still try to get together when we can.

Since those first days more than two and a half years ago, we have taken almost the entire Child Development class series. Social Butterflies. Sprouts.

Sign & Sing. Explorers. Lightning Bugs.

There’s a part of me that’s pretty sad about the fact that my kids are about to age out of the Isis offerings.  But we’ve had an awesome time there. It was always a safe place to go. A place where they understood babies who cried, toddlers who touched things they weren’t supposed to, and moms who were exhausted, at their wits end, or celebrating the biggest or tiniest of accomplishments.

So, when my friend Cindy at Isis invited me to a big launch event at the Boston Isis location, I was tickled. While I’ve always been skeptical when a company does some “rebranding,” in this case I think it was a fitting evolution.  It started as “Isis Maternity” six years ago, and quickly became the largest provider of prenatal education in the country. It is the official childbirth education provider for nearly all of the major Boston hospitals.  Their prenatal classes of all varieties (hypnobirthing, anyone?) are great, but they go way beyond those few months of pregnancy. Classes through age 3.  Toys and gear and clothing from nursing bras and slings to puzzles and ride-on toys. Every product is on someone’s “must-have” list, and is the latest in gadget-y, organic-y, and of-the-moment-y stuff.

Their new identity is “Isis: Parenting Starts Here.”  That couldn’t be more fitting. It was really and truly where I got my start. I could go on for days about how the classes there gave me confidence, taught me how to get out of the house, taught my kids how to behave in a group class setting, and always was one of my favorite outings.  Boston-area parents, do yourself a favor. If you’re at all accessible to Arlington, Boston, Brookline, or Needham, sign yourself and your babies up for whatever class you can. If the price seems too high to manage, talk to someone at the center, because they’ve got a community fund to help if the cost is prohibitive.

I have never regretted signing up for a class at Isis, and I bet you won’t, either.

• M&Ms
• Games on my iPhone
• Books
• Songs
• Congratulatory phone calls to
  • Daddy
  • Grandma
  • Grandpa
  • Aunt Rachel
• Pennies (for her “collection”)

We may be turning a bit of a corner, in that she has finally started telling me that she needs to use the potty. It is often a false alarm, but I’ve been praising her and thanking her for telling me, even if there’s no actual production.

Our first trip out of the house yesterday afternoon was not terribly successful.  We went to a playdate at a friend’s house, but it turns out to have been the most gargantuan playdate yet.  Our previous record for number of kids was 12, but yesterday was a whopping 18 kids, all but one under the age of 3.  It proved to be a bit much for Rebecca, who had two small and two larger accidents in quick succession.  She was clearly sort of trying to hold it, but also wouldn’t release when I scooped her up and sat her on the potty. Alas, work in progress.  And despite bringing a few changes, she rode home with no pants.  What can you do…

This morning, however, was much better.  She had a spontaneous ask-to-use-the-potty moment that, when I let her play a game on my phone in an effort to keep her on the potty for more than 3 seconds, actually resulted in success!  Yipee!  We then had a totally dry trip to music class (with one false-alarm potty request, and yes, I had the travel potty set up discretely in the corner), and followed it up with an accident-free stop at Starbucks.

Someday, I promise, I’ll stop writing about potty training…

Well, OK. Let’s not over-state things.  It wasn’t Hamlet.  It was Sesame Street Live. We went with a friend and her daughter, and I’m happy to report that it was a hit.

It had several good things working in its favor, of course.  It was Sesame Street. The characters were already familiar and beloved.  The show was clearly going to be on their level.  Also, the show we went to was at 10:30 in the morning – a perfect outing time for the afternoon-nap set.

I honestly wasn’t sure how to explain this idea to the kids as I tried to prep them for the experience.  “It’s a show. It’s Sesame Street. But not on TV. On a stage. (Oh, wait, you don’t know what a stage is.) Well, whatever. Elmo and Big Bird will be there.”  That was good enough.

They did a great job staying (more or less) in their seats, and in an auditorium full of young children, there isn’t much of a premium placed on keeping too quiet.

The show started with some pretty flashy lights and upbeat music, which was enough to send Rebecca into M’s lap.  There was some initial crying, followed by (her current favorite) hiding behind her hands, but eventually she peeked out. By the second half of the show, she was excitedly sitting in her own seat and watching intently.

Daniel, on the other hand, was enthralled from the get-go. True to his technical-director/set-builder/light-designer daddy, he was particularly interested in how the colors and shapes of the lights on the curtains kept changing.

Intermission was a good break to run around in the hallways, but all three kids were excited for it to start up again.  As the second act neared its end, the din in the auditorium went up as several hundred preschoolers hit the limits of their attention span.  And when Daniel had a meltdown on the way to the car, I can’t say I was entirely surprised.

As an adult, of course, it was a little weird and trippy to see Cookie Monster doing a cartwheel and Elmo shaking his groove thing, as well as a strange use of a Vanessa Carleton song.  But, hey, the kids had a blast. So if you find the Sesame Street gang is headed to a venue near you, I highly recommend checking it out.

But this was different. This was Aura.  A real restaurant. With ambiance and a wine list.  The kind you’d feel out of place in jeans.  And we were taking the kids.  And it was great.

So, I got an email about this event through my blog (This is why you make your contact info available, people! Sometimes you hear about cool stuff!).  The restaurant puts on “Fine Dining, Family-Style” about once a month.  For December, they were doing it twice, once for Hannukah and once for Christmas.  There was a separate kids’ menu and parents’ menu, in this case populated with delicious traditional holiday items.  And at one end of the space, they had taken out the tables and filled half the room with toys, games, and a train table. Heck, I think there was even a TV playing some Dora.

We had a great time.  OK, so the kids were having too much fun to come sit at the table and eat unfamiliar (though delicious) foods.  But they were enjoying themselves, and M and I were able to have a nice dinner together.

I have only two regrets.  The first is that I should have asked if they could have food from the “regular” kids’ menu (chicken fingers and the like) instead of trying to convince them to eat latkes (and they were awesome latkes, they didn’t know what they were missing).  Another family did that, and M and I slapped our foreheads wondering why we didn’t think of that.

The other regret is that, when the kids found their little bags of gelt, we let them hold onto the bags in the car. Only to return home and find a tightly-clenched chocolate disaster in each child’s lap. Awesome.

Seriously, though.  Boston-area folks, I strongly recommend this for the 2-ish and up set. Have the adventure, get a nice dinner, let the kids play.  It was lovely.

Thankfully, my beloved sister-in-law and her boyfriend were able to spend much of the day with the kids, and we had a perfectly lovely afternoon (and solo dinner and bedtime) together. The evening was blessedly quiet, and it really felt like a load off to have the sale done.

But Sunday was the big hit of the weekend for the kids.  A nearby office park hosts “Touch a Truck Day.”  All kinds of trucks were there to climb on: snowplows and backhoes, garbage trucks and fire trucks, even a limousine and a big moving van.  Despite cooler temperatures and an off-and-on drizzling rain, we stayed for nearly two hours.  Even before we arrived, Rebecca declared that it was not so much touch a truck as it was hug a truck.  The recipient of her affection was one of the fire trucks:

Daniel had a blast with the backhoe. “It’s a shovel for pushing dirt, Mommy!” (Yes, those were literally his words. The speech from that one is unbelievable… and non-stop.)

Balloons were a hit, as were the lollipops given to them by Bob the Builder. Of course, they don’t actually watch Bob the Builder, so they thought the man in the costume with the giant head was another fireman. I told them it was Bob the Builder, and for the rest of the day they told me that “Bob” gave them lollipops. Like he was an old friend.  And Rebecca actually went up and said “hi” to the (actual) firemen.

It was a little tricky handling this outing with the 1:2 adult-to-toddler ratio.  They wanted to walk, but the stroller was still handy.  But it was tricky keeping them together, not to mention making sure they didn’t fall off of something high.  Speaking of which, one of my more questionable choices of the morning was going with both of them on top of the crane bed. The picture doesn’t do it justice, but it was about 10 feet off the ground and no railing of any kind. It was hairy for a minute, but we all survived.

All-in-all, though, it was a big hit.  A great way to spend the morning, lots of cool things to see and talk about, and close enough to home that we were able to stay almost all the way up to lunchtime before making a break for it. Can’t ask for much more than that on an otherwise gloomy Sunday morning.

M had a late night at work last night, but when I asked him what he wanted to do this morning, he surprised me by suggesting the Museum of Science! So we piled into the car, and that’s where we went.

Obviously most of it is above our kids’ age level. But there’s a nice sectioned-off “Discovery Center” that has more hands-on things for the younger crowd, and we definitely enjoyed the live butterfly exhibit and the dinosaurs.  And Daniel liked any station that involved pushing buttons.

But we were having so much fun outside that I decided dinner would be an impromptu backyard picnic.  While M isn’t a huge fan of eating amongst the bugs, he humored me.  Mmm, bratwurst…

There was practically uninteruppted playtime out in the yard from the time they woke up from their nap until we hauled them upstairs to the tub.  Yay for nice days!

Yesterday was a cranky day, but we all survived.  Today there was a threat of rain, so we decided to hit the aquarium.  It was not exactly deserted, and I was ever so glad to have our membership and just skip right past the long lines.  (And not feel bad about leaving quickly when meltdowns occurred.) It’s really hard to get good photos in the very low light of the indoor aquarium, but I managed a couple of good ones with the much beloved jellyfish exhibit.

And the kids enjoyed saying hello to the turtles in the first aid area.

Now they’re sleeping, I’m going to hit the sewing machine, and we’re going to hope that the threat of severe thunderstorms doesn’t ruin our afternoon barbeque plans with friends…. fingers crossed.