Halloween at Our Place

After the festivities today at Ria's house, I got the lowdown on Caroline's day. Turns out that when Ria wasn't watching, she picked up and licked the frosting off about half a dozen cupcakes and put them ever-so-carefully back on the plate. When asked is she ate the frosting off the cupcakes, Caroline of course said "YES". We try to teach our daughter manners. Honest. We even make her use her silverwear to eat spagetti and say things like "please, thank you, bless you and Amen". I guess there is just more Leahy in her than it looks like from the outside...
We went to a few houses trick or treating tonight. We, of course, bought twenty dollars worth of candy (after almost running out last year) and had a whopping total of four trick or treaters this year. The best was when two children (aged about 10 and 7, I suppose) came to the door. The girl was dressed in a beautiful velvet dress and had her hair all done up. I asked her who she was and she said "Guinevere". Pretty creative, I thought. The little boy looked like something out of the middle ages, so I asked him if he was King Arthur. Nope, he said he was Annikan Skywalker. Only then did I notice his sword was a light sabre. DUH.
Caroline did pretty well with the whole trick or treat thing. She did try to take the whole bowl of candy at our neighbor's house instead of just a piece, but she was starting to get the idea and have fun with it. We knew she was tired when we came down from one house with Jim and said "All done candy". We went home after that. Her costume was super cute. I hope her baby brother likes Nemo so we can get more than one wear out of it.

Nemo: rested and ready for action.

Nemo and "dude"

Can we go now? PLLLLLLEEEEEAAAAASSSSSE?

Trying to get Alaina and Caroline to pose together...needless to say - it didn't work

Ummm....Yeah. I guess she didn't try to take the whole bowl of candy only at the neighbor's house.

"Dada. Candy. Please."

Waiting for the trick or treaters to arrive...

Caroline's best "Young Frankenstein" imitation

Attacking a Hershey bar

Attacking Junior

Peek-a-boo. I see you.

Halloween at Ria's

Some pics from today...

Again!

I liked seeing these on the front pages of the papers this morning...It makes being so tired worth it.

Holy Schnikes!

How I am expected to be at work at seven thirty tomorrow morning is beyond me at this point. My consolation (besides THIS) is that everyone else will need toothpicks to hold up their eyelids, too...



PS - I have to stay up to see Papelchops dance (and hope he wears spandex while he's doing it)

Sunday Night...

It's almost 11pm and 8 more outs to go. Timmy is in. I"m trying to stay calm. But this entry may be cut short, as the score was 3-0 when I was cross stitching and now it's 3-1 and I'm on the computer. I may very well be overestimating my power as a fan...but the number one rule is not to mess with a winning streak - so I may need to start stitching again if things don't turn around very soon.

Oh no - now Gagne is warming up in the pen. I need to get some more Tums. Timlin better not mess up too badly....Considering how nervous I was with the five run lead we had last night, the fact that I can put together at least semi-coherent sentances is rather impressive at this point, though. =-)

We got back this afternoon from Utica. Poor Matt...we kind of took over his apartment - but he didn't seem to mind too much...Caroline was in rare form most of the weekend. She really enjoyed her time with Nana and Papa and Uncle Matt. So did we.

Here are some pics from the weekend...

If you ask Caroline what is in Mommy's belly, she puffs up hers as big as she can and says "It's a baby"...
Daddy and Caroline running around at Uncle Matt's football game this morning...

CRAZY GIRL!!!

...And we were finally able to get a family picture. We tried to get the Pedroia jersey on the bottom in honor of Smalls, but his sister was too wiggly...

Okie is Okie Dokie in Game 2

Hey Look!

It's Caroline in a Dustin Pedroia t-shirt (that just happens to be Pedroia's actual size)!

PS - ...watching the Red Sox games the past few nights (thank goodness for games being on non-pay television), I knew that one of the medical staff in dugout looked very familiar. Turns out I went to college with him. He used to do great imitations of the Boston teens on Saturday Night Live as we were waiting to take tests. And now he's famous. What an amazing oppourtunity it must be to work with such great athletes. Here he is below pictured with Jon Lester...

Boston

Good news! I didn't get called into work today. Hooray! And while there were many, many things that we could have done around the house, since it was 75 degrees and sunny without a clould in the sky, we decided to drive into Boston and hang around Fenway before the madness of game 7. After all, the last time there was a game seven in Boston was 1986.

We had a really nice day.

We parked in the Prudential Center garage, but should have parked on Westland St (2 blocks away) where it was $10 cheaper. Oh, well. We walked all over. Through all the new additions that they put on the Pru, through the Christian Science Center and then through the Fens over to Fenway Park.


During the time we were at Fenway, it wasn't too crazy - so we decided to go to the Boston Beer Works for lunch. GREAT food. We had quite possibly the best clam chowder I have ever tasted and the biggest and best salad I've eaten for five dollars. Oh - and dessert was amazing (mud pie - chocolate and coffee ice cream on an Oreo crust - Caroline thought it to be excellent - as you will see by the picture).





There were lots of televisions so we could watch the Pats/Dolphins game (yawn). The biggest snafu in our day came when we were eating our dinner. Jim and Caroline were on one side of the table and I was on the other (closest to the windows). There were four or five shelves of old beer bottles lined up in the windows about ten feet over my head - they added to the character of the place, I thought as I was sitting down. Seems that my guardian angel was working overtime today because one of the bottles fell off the shelf during our meal and landed right in the backpack that I had put our jackets in that was sitting next to me. If I had been six inches to my left and sitting across from Caroline (like I usually do to try to keep her in line), I probably be dealing with a nasty head wound and a concussion. But, thank goodness, the bottle landed harmlessly into the backpack and did nothing but get our jackets really dusty. With the money the Beer Works manager was nice enough not to charge us because of the "incident", we were good little capitalists and went to the Souvenir Store and got Red Sox t-shirts for everyone. Smalls included (though it won't fit him for a while).

After that, we went back to the Pru (after meandering through my old stomping grounds at Northestern) and we got to play and get our wiggles out in the garden that they put in the middle of the new wing.

Mommy and Caroline slept almost all the way home...

So we had a great day. AND we ate enough at the BeerWorks that I won't have to cook dinner and we can just relax and get ready for the week ahead.

Strange?

We put back up the "How Sweep It Is" and "Miracle" newspapers on the fridge from 2004 today (they were taken down earlier in the week because of our kitchen renovations). Caroline also started carrying around two random baseball cards she found and insisted on bringing them to bed with her. Amusingly enough, one of the cards is of Eric Wedge. If the Sox win tonight (that is, if Gagne doesn't self destruct) I think we may encourage her to do the same tomorrow night.
Just in case.

These late night games are killing me, I tell you. Who cares if the people on the West Coast don't get to see them? They got to see the Rockies / D-Backs games at a reasonable time. Let's hope I don't get called into work tomorrow - but I have a feeling a lot of the inpatients will be tired from staying up to watch the game, too.

Nemo

A Halloween preview...

Girls Night In

Last night Caroline (and Smalls) and I had great time watching the game. We were nice and cozy, unlike Jim, who was actually sitting in the stands freezing his butt off. But hey, you can't complain about a free ticket, right?! So, while Daddy was at Fenway, we had chinese food and big bowls of ice cream and settled in for the night.


She passed out somewhere around the fifth inning and I put the game on the radio and went upstairs after the seventh (and no, Junior isn't laying on her, he's kneading the blanket beside her)


We were having so much fun, I didn't even think to complain about McCarver. But then I groaned when I heard Geffner on WRKO. I guess I gave the Sox too much credit when I thought they had relegated him to on-field duties for the ALDS. Ugh - Castiglione and Dave O'Brien are so much better. But the score of the game helped me to ignore Geffner. Thank goodness.
GO SOX!

This morning, we went to get Caroline her first haircut. There were tears (during for Caroline and afterwards for Mommy) - but she looks nice. We just evened out the back of her hair, since she had no hair on the right backside of her head because it all breaks off when she twirls it as she sucks her finger. I hope we can still do pig-tails.


Oh - and Caroline learned "what a Tarzan says". It's not the best video, but it's cute...

To Make You Laugh...

Jim and I have been following this guy for a while. He's been on the radio here and his website is as close as you get to mandatory reading for any New England sports fan. He has certainly cleaned up his act a lot since ESPN hired him to do the Gate Crashing segment for Monday Night Football (this is a good thing - I like to think of this as a family-oriented blog). It's nice to hear him speak and have every other word not be a curse word, but he's just so-wicked Billerica and so sterotypical of (especially) Patriots fans that I can't help but laugh at him. And I'm glad he's out there so the rest of the world sees what those of us that happen to live in New England, but whose sporting world expands beyond the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots have to deal with on a daily basis. Being as much of a Bills fan as anything else, I really appreciated this. But the third grader in me can't help but laugh so hard that I almost pee myself when I see this (and I don't even like the Celtics). I think I'll never be mature enough not to laugh at it.

Sunday Night

First of all...how cool is this?!?!?!

Let me just say that Schill game me some heartburn today in the early innings - but it all ended up just fine. After all, if you've been reading lately - you know that most things give me heartburn these days...Guess I should stock up on Tums for the ALCS. We'll see if it will be the Indians or the Yanks. Listening to the Yanks broadcast, it seems that Sterling is nervous, but he tends to err on the side of fatalism. Pulllllease. Everyone of twenty other major league clubs will be banging down Torre's door tomorrow morning if they lose tonight. I cannot think of a classier manager, or more importantly, a manager I would rather have working for my team than Torre. He'll land on his feet whatever happens...and so will the Yankees - they always do (sigh).

Though I was super-bummed that I couldn't go to my cousin's soccer game this weekend (stupid three hour glucose test), I was happy to meet another one of my cousins (our grandparents are brother and sister...that makes us cousins, right?) for dinner today. She goes to Clark University here in Worcester, but is from Wisconsin. When you're that far from home, it's just nice to have someone that you're related to somewhere around...and I'll trade home cooking for baby-sitting on just about any day of the week! =-)

Grammy and Grampy were nice enough to watch Caroline yesterday morning and it looks like they had a really good time.

Jim was also able to teach Caroline the "proper" cowgirl greeting...