::boston adventure pt 2::

Tthis is long overdue.
When Kris's mom was here we went up to Boston to see a cool historical cemetery--as you might remember since I posted about it forever ago.

When we got there we realized that the cemetery was on the Freedom Trail, which is a walking path through Boston that takes you by historical sites.

So we kept on walkin'!

Right up the hill from the cemetery is the famous church where Paul Revere hung his lanterns (you know, one if by land, two if by sea). The Old North Church.


Isn't that a pretty steeple? The church has been refurbished relatively recently I think.


The inside was really interesting. There are all these little compartments down on the main floor. Each family I guess had their own little compartment and could set it up however they wanted. The guide telling us about it said that some people would decorate their spot like a little living room.
Sounds pretty comfy to me. I'm about ready to adopt the practice in our church! It would make things a lot easier.


We enjoyed looking around until Max started making himself a little too much at home--opening and closing all those little doors was way too much fun.

Since Kris's mom was there we actually have a photo with all three of us in it! Yay.

Small part three to come eventually.....

Monsters Inc

Last time Ginna and Max were at Walt Disney World they ran into a saxophone quartet. They really liked it and Ginna got to talk to one of the players. Somehow she ended up with a copy of the the theme to Monsters Inc arranged for saxophone quartet.

This weekend Ginna decided to record the arrangement so Max and I could hear it. Max had been dying to get the microphone out anyway and record himself singing some of this songs. (Maybe they'll get posted sometime)

I like it when Ginna plays music because it reminds me so much of when we were first together. Besides, she's awesome. So, here are some pictures of the process and an opportunity to hear the finished project with an introduction from Max C.

As a side note, Max has split himself into two different people: Max C and Max H. I'm not always sure of the difference and I'm not sure I know when he's one or the other.

Untitled from Ginna Hendricks on Vimeo.

::you never know::

A year or so ago Kris gave a talk in sacrament meeting.  He told a story having something to do with the fact that dirty socks on the floor gross him out. I think he was illustrating a point about how dads can develop goofy soapboxes--you know, like wet towels on the floor, sliming the couch and having a clean garage.

Max was listening super close to this talk (somehow) and when Kris told this story he thought it was hilarious. Super funny. And he laughed like crazy, really loud.

Ever since that day Max has left dirty socks on the floor--for the express purpose of grossing Kris out. And it drives us nuts. We'll forget about the whole thing. The joke completely slips our minds and one of us will be yelling at Max about leaving his dirty laundry out on the floor of the house AGAIN. And he'll say sadly, "But I wanted to gross dad out with the socks!" (except he says he wants to "stink" him out. I assume it means the same thing, since his socks don't actually stink--usually anyway.)

It happened tonight again.

You never know what might come back to bite you. I wonder how long this will go on.

::serious question::

Why does my son make such weird faces?

::halloween night::

Max didn't feel so hot on halloween. He's been a little sick for a while, and he had a cough that was definitely plaguing him. We had plans to halloween party it with our friends, but unfortunately the cough kept us home.
I had been hoping to get us over to one of the local farms for some pumpkin patch time sometime during October. I was hoping to get our jack o lantern pumpkins that way. But the later into October it got, the more I realized that we were not going to make it. The day before halloween I went searching for a pumpkin or two. In vain. No pumpkins to be found.
So on halloween afternoon, after we took advantage of the $1 chicken dinner coupon at boston market, we went questing after pumpkins again.
But no luck! It's hard to believe, but there wasn't a pumpkin to be found here in our town. No grocery stores, no nurseries, nothing.
So luckily Max had brought a pumpkin back from his school field trip. And we had purchased a really small one at Trader Joe's a while back just for fun. So we had had a little something to work with.

Max was all tired and a little sick, so we rented a couple of cheesy halloween kid's movies and let him relax on the couch with a cookie or two.


Then when nighttime came we worked on the jack-o-lanterns.

Max designed the face on his.


And I cut it out for him.
In the meantime Kris was working on the teeny one. It took him forever just to cut the top open. I don't think this little guy was meant for carving. He was HARD.
So Kris got out his dremmel to see if he could make something happen.


Max's turned out really cute.


the backside:

And we went and lit Max's up while Kris was still struggling with the baby one.


Kris finally got out his drill with a great big circular bit on it and got down to business with the little one.
The finished product? Pretty good I think:


We ate some dinner and then took Max out for a little trick or treating. Our neighborhood is great because the streets are small and twisty with lots of little houses--not many through streets either. The night was really nice, not too cold. There weren't a ton of kids out, but there were lots of nice people handing out candy and some fun decorated houses.
We had a fun time taking him around. He was dressed as Dash from the Incredibles, by the way in case you couldn't tell from the photos in this post.
He started telling everyone "Happy Halloween" after he had thanked them for the candy. It was so funny how surprised some of the people were that he was so polite. One old lady even called her husband over to see him. It was amusing.
After about 45 minutes Max ran out of steam. Kris had to carry him home. He had a total haul. So much candy. I don't know what we're going to do with all of it.

It was a fun halloween.

::a glimpse::

Max's little jack-o-latern:

100 pieces of candy:

counted painstakingly when we got home from trick or treating.
Fun stuff.
More to come.

::halloween tradition::

Max and I made a batch of halloween sugar cookies for the first time four years ago, in our first house in Kansas City.  It was a bit of an ordeal, making cookies with a two year old, and I just wasn't that good at cooking back then (I'm only slightly better now.)
But they turned out so delicious and cute that we had to do it again next year. Or maybe it was the fact that Sultan ate most of the cookies that year--we accidentally left him in the house and the cookies on the counter when we went to deliver some to friends. We needed to make up for that.

So we've made cookies for the last four years, and the crazy thing, in four different kitchens. You think that sounds like too much moving? Why yes, yes it is.

So we made our traditional batch this week. I added a few new cookie cutters last year taking advantage of after holiday sales. It was fun to get to use them. Max's new favorite is the ghost.

I like him because he only requires white frosting, yay.

Max is getting better at helping--at least he doesn't just spill all the cookie cutters on the floor and roll them around in the flour like he did the first year.
He's my decorator now. Last year we got M&Ms and candy corn and he made faces on all the pumpkins. I wish I would've done that this year, instead we just did the standard sprinkles and such. But it was still fun. I only had to yell at Max 10 or 12 times for dumping the whole tube of sprinkles on one cookie.

Fun to make with my Max, but even more fun to eat. Which is what Kris thought when he came home from work to a kitchen full of delicious cookies! Mmmmmm.

::boston adventure pt 1::

This is the spooky part of our Boston adventure.
Kris's mom was here visiting last week and we had a really great time. She's been wanting to go up to Boston ever since we moved out here, so on Sunday after church we piled into the car and headed on up. Kris has a who-knows-how-many-great great grandfather that's buried in a cemetery up there. We've been meaning to go up there for a while and find it. This was the perfect opportunity.
Turns out this cemetery is famous. It's on the freedom trail in Boston, which is another cool thing we haven't taken advantage of. But we will. I'm sure.
It's said that this ancestor of Kris's and Kathy's helped to found Harvard. So it was a long while ago that we was alive. In fact the best we could tell is that he died in the 1690s--that should give you an idea of the age of this cemetery.

It was really picturesque. Right smack in the middle of the city stuff--apartments and tiny streets packed with cars all around. It was really close to the water too.

It also didn't hurt that it was an amazingly beautiful fall day.

This cemetery had headstones with dates as early as 1600! I think the latest stuff was the in the 1800s. All the headstons were different, and they were all amazing looking. Actually, I thought most all of them were really spooky.
I'm having a really hard time deciding which photos to post. I had to take a picture of every different skull I saw, and there were so many. No mass production here.





I find nothing comforting about these gravestones. They're so stark and scary, aren't they?
We couldn't find Kris's ancestor George. So many of the stones were broken or had been worn down into illegibility. But we did find a George without a last name, and I think that's going to have to count.

His stone may be there somewhere and we could've just missed it. But who knows.
Max was running around tripping over gravestones. That didn't make me too happy. So we snagged him and made him hold hands. That didn't make him too happy. But too bad.

Kris finally found something for him to do.

There was some ramp somewhere--who knows why. And so Max ran up and down it for the next 15 minutes.

I promise, it's sturdier than it looks. And since he wasn't running on people's bodies, or breaking centuries old grave markers I was happy.

A strange coincidence--I had just read the october issue of Martha Stewart Living, and it had a big article about old New England cemeteries and their grave stones. Some of them look so similar to the ones we saw.  It was really interesting.  I found a copy of it online you can check out if you want here.
And if you're dying for more gravestones and want to spook yourself out I have a lot more--just go to my flickr.

RIP.

::::

Max asked for peanut butter toast, but ended up with a peanut butter ghost. Spooky, right?