Day 6: Boston's Freedom Trail

I've had this post partly finished for days now but we've been so busy having fun and so tired at the end of each day that it's just had to wait...

After our time in Palmyra, we arrived at my sister Saydi's house in Boston late at night and snuck the kids into their cousin's rooms to go right to sleep (Saydi had told them we wouldn't be arriving until the next day). There was serious excitement when the kids woke up (all too early) the next morning!

Even though it was almost midnight, I was tired and there was construction traffic to deal with (always the story in Boston), driving into Boston brought out this sweet homecoming feeling in me. My first home was in Boston when my parents lived there while my dad was in graduate school. I lived in the Boston area off and on for 10 years for college, grad school and work. Jared and I met there and spent the first year of our married life living there. Boston holds a very special place in my personal history and in our family history.

Saydi and I went on a beautiful and challenging run while the kids had the time of their lives catching up. Then we headed into Boston to do Beacon Hill and the Freedom Trail. Saydi printed out some great stuff to help everyone look for clues along the way and make everything extra fun.

The kids riding on the T - super excited - trains are always a huge hit!

The T was a big part of my life and Jared's during the many years we lived in Boston.

Ready for their 1st T ride (Eliza and Hazel were so excited to wear their matching outfits and Oliver and Silas just can't get enough of Charlie)

Saydi getting us ready for all the cool things we'd be seeing
(In the Boston Common - State House in the background)

Here we are riding the ducks in the Boston Public Gardens (from the book, Make Way for Duckings). There were exactly enough ducks for all of us.

 Here are the swan boats:

 After the Public Gardens, we wandered around probably my favorite neighborhood anywhere in the world - Beacon Hill. The micro-gardens are exquisite, the flower boxes so perfect, the old gas lanterns, brick sidewalks, and fancy doorways are just plain lovely. 

Acorn Street on Beacon Hill - the most photographed street in America.

Saydi and I on Acorn Street

Ashton, Isaac, Eliza, Hazel, Emmeline, and Peter on Acorn Street.

Silas with a door he found that was just his size.

After Beacon Hill, we began the official Freedom Trail at the Boston State House. (Emmaline likes to pretend to be asleep in all photos...)

 Eliza and Hazel ready to start the Freedom Trail

The Old State House - little building was the capital of the colonies when England was in charge. The Declaration of Independence was first read from this balcony and the Boston Massacre happened right here.

Silas found a little "midget door"

Kids LOVED watching street performers at Fanuiel Hall

Another cool show

Here they are at Paul Revere's house in the North End (oldest building in Boston, I believe)

And here they are with Paul Revere:

The kids did some jumping pictures by the Old North Church with Saydi while I went searching for Isaac who we'd somehow misplaced. Luckily he remembered the rule about staying right were you are if you get lost and I found him pretty quickly. We were so focused on keeping track of the older kids that somehow, Isaac fell off our radar for a bit... In the background, you can make out the steeple where Paul Revere hung the famous lantern (or was it two? one if by land, two if by sea or the other way around?). I'm not good at getting my camera to take shots that get the lighting right in the foreground and background simultaneously...

Ashton insisted we put this one in:

We finished off the day with a delicious dinner at Wagumama at Fanuiel Hall, watched a great band play for a while, then headed home on the T with some very happy and very tired children.

We had to throw in a little subway surfing on the train home - if you move your feet, you're out!


What a perfectly wonderful day full of history and learning and fun and adventure. The weather was perfect. The kids were excited and happy pretty much all day. And we only lost one kid for a few minutes...

Day 5: Pennsylvania and NY (state)

Hi.

It's me, Ashton. I'm here to tell you about what we did today!

First, we woke up in our hotel in Erie, PA and had breakfast. We love free breakfast hotels! Our mom never lets us eat the stuff they have there - like sugared cereal, danishes, donuts, etc. But at free breakfast hotels, she lets us go wild and eat all that stuff and more.

We then set off on the road for Palmyra. When we got there, we went to the Hill Cumorah and had a tour of the visitor's center. We watched a cool movie about families and went up a short trail to the Moroni Monument. It was a huge monument with a golden Moroni on top. Oliver liked the picture with Oliver Cowdry.

The Hill Cumorah is where Joseph Smith found the golden plates that Moroni had buried. Moroni showed Joseph where the plates were buried. The golden plates contained what is now the Book of Mormon. After receiving the plates, Joseph translated them. At the visitor's center, we learned how mobs tried to steal the plates, so Joseph had to hide them.

After that, we drove to Joseph Smith's cabin. It was very small, but Joseph Smith's family - his seven siblings and parents - all had to live in it. We saw the table where the Smith family read the scriptures every day and an old bible.

Upstairs, we saw the room that Joseph shared with his five brothers and where he was visited by the angel Moroni. It's actually not the real cabin, but a very accurate replica.

We walked down the road then and saw his newer frame house. It was a big improvement from the last one. We learned about how his brother Alvin had started on it, but didn't finish because he got sick and died. The cabin was 85% original, so it was the actual house that Joseph Smith had been in with the golden plates.


We saw the hearth that he had removed bricks from to hide the gold plates when a mob was coming to steal them.


We also saw the wooden box that he kept the plates in. And once, when his sisters were sleeping and a mob was coming, he hid the plates between his two sleeping sisters, and we saw the room that they slept in.

After we finished touring the cabins, the tour guide left and we went into the Sacred Grove. We went into silent mode and each said our own prayer. The ground had tons of soft pine needles, and my flip-flops weren't the most comfortable, so I went barefoot. It was very quiet (aside from the occasional chirping of birds) and peaceful. The Sacred Grove is where Joseph Smith, after consulting the Bible, went to pray to God about which church to join. God showed Himself and Jesus to Joseph and told him to create a new church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We walked back to our car and went to the intersection with a church on all four corners - Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Seeing those churches made me realize why Joseph Smith had trouble about which church to join. Down the road was the Book of Mormon publication building, where the first Book of Mormon was published.

If you want to REALLY enjoy Palmyra, go early in June on a Wednesday. NOBODY there! Private tours!

We're on the drive to Boston now, going through New York. It is very green with lots of big hills (big enough to give us views, and the best view we've gotten before this is the balcony in front of our hotel room that looked down on the lobby). It's a lot more rural than I thought it would be - when I think of New York, I think of NYC.

Day 4: Indiana, Ohio, Friends and a Temple

Our main experience in Indiana was the hotel fiasco I wrote about in my last post. But I'm sure it's a great place! The kids weren't super impressed when I belted out the song "Gary, Indiana" from the musical, The Music Man, as we passed Gary Indiana. But I just had to do it.

Driving through Ohio, we saw lots more farms, it was green and lush, and there were picturesque barns everywhere, mostly red ones (tried to get a decent photo but it just didn't work out - as I drive I'm always saying to whoever's riding shotgun - "grab the camera - get that barn!" but the moment to capture the shot is pretty short lived when you're going 70 mph).

Isaac did capture a couple shots of Cleveland. Sorry we didn't have time to explore Cleveland this time round....




We spent the afternoon with my dear friend Sarah who I met through her blog, Clover Lane. She's come to one of our Power of Moms Retreats and has helped promote Power of Moms quite a bit over the past few years plus she's contributed excellent posts to our site and wrote a chapter in our book, Deliberate Motherhood. But most importantly, she's become one of my favorite and best cyber-friends over the years and it was a huge treat to be able to hang out together in person and have our kids get to know each other. They hit it off right away and my kids had a really excellent time playing soccer, climbing trees, jumping on the trampoline, making fun bracelets, and playing with their dog (Oliver's favorite part) while Sarah and I talked and talked and crammed in as much as we could in our precious time together.

 

Eliza's photo of me and Sarah:

Ashton's version:

Then we spent a little time this evening at the Kirtland Temple - the first temple built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Saints had so very little but they gave their time and meager possessions to build what was then about the largest and grandest building in Ohio. While they lived in rickety little cabins, they built a beautiful house in honor of their God. It's a lovely, stately monument to their sacrifice and faith and the grounds around it are lovely. The kids and I read plaques about it and looked up more details on my phone and wandered through the grounds as it started to get dark. It was after hours so we couldn't go inside but we felt the power of the place and learned quite a bit through what we read.

Great little moments today:

• The street our hotel is on is called Oliver Street. When we saw the street sign, Oliver said "Look at that! I KNEW I was important!"
• Ashton was pretty nice to everyone most of the time today. This was a great improvement over yesterday.
• In our family prayer tonight, Silas said "Thank you for our beautiful wonderful mommy who is taking us to so many super wonderful places and making everything so fun." So wonderful to hear that!
• All the kids jumped in and made friends so quickly with Sarah's kids - loved seeing how friendly and adaptable and kind they are.
• Great talks with different kids sitting in the passenger seat at various points - great little questions they've asked and good stories and laughs we've shared. I've so loved the time to just talk and follow their interests and questions with this dedicated time in the car. 

(There were plenty of not-so-great moments of squabbling and bickering and bothering each other in the car but I won't dwell on those.)

Now we're in Erie, PA having a much much much nicer hotel experience than we had last night. Yeah! Better go enjoy that nice bed over there (I'm sitting in the closet so the computer light won't affect the kids. This floor is getting pretty hard and my back aches. Enough for tonight!)

A little aside on hotels....

Last night was hard.

We booked a room through Priceline as we usually do on road trips but somehow, we ended up completing the booking just as we crossed from one time zone to another and it changed from 11pm to 12pm. This caused the Priceline website to bump our reservation to the next day while we were completing it. So when we got the confirmation, we found that we were booked for a hotel on the night of the 4th when we meant to get one for the night of the 3rd.

After about an hour on the phone with various people at Priceline who kept repeating company policies and didn't seem to be listening to what I was saying, it was LATE and I was pretty frustrated. They said they could make an exception and allow us to cancel our reservation but they'd only partially refund the money and our partial refund could only be applied to a hotel reservation made that night. But the website wouldn't allow us to make a reservation for the night we needed to make the reservation for since it was already past midnight. Aaaarrrrggggg! I was polite as I talked to different people but I was pretty frustrated. Their policies just didn't make sense given our particular circumstances and apparently since it was the middle of the night, there weren't any decision-makers I could talk to. I ultimately felt pretty bad for the guys I was talking to (who sounded like they were in India perhaps) and moved on to talking with the hotel where we'd been inadvertently booked for the wrong night so see if they could help.

I spent the next 1/2 hour or so talking with a very nice guy named Alan at Country Inn and Suites and he was much more helpful. He had a hard time working with Priceline as they hadn't sent over my payment at all - not even for the date for which I ended up having a room booked. But ultimately, it all worked out and I led a bunch of half-asleep kids into a hotel room at about 2am.

I'm so sad because I've previously had such great luck with finding excellent prices on nice hotels with Priceline but wow, I'm pretty wary of them now. Hotwire seems to have much better customer service. We do the thing where you get to see the amenties and star rating and area of a hotel as well as a special discount price but don't get to see the actual name of the hotel until after booking. We've always been pleased with the steep discounts we get and the nice places we stay. We've found that the 2.5 star hotels are the best for us - nice places, generally new, comfy beds, nice pillows (pillows matter to me quite a bit), free internet usually and almost always free breakfast which is a huge hit with the kids. The three star hotels are not much nicer and they don't usually have free breakfast or free internet and sometimes charge for parking. Weird that cheaper and less stars is a bit better but I think it is.

Road Trip Day 3: Chicago

Part I: The Retreat (as dictated to me, Ashton, while Mom drives :D)

Started off the day with a great retreat. We had about 20 great moms gather at a gorgeous home and discuss how we can bring more peace, purpose, order, and joy to our lives. So enjoyed presenting with Paige Clark, one of our excellent Power of Moms trainers who lives in Chicago. Such a great group; I only wish I had more time with them. We crammed in as much learning from each other as we could in half a day. Such a beautiful in that peaceful, lovely home as we discussed our favorite moments of motherhood and how we can be more present, peaceful, and joyful.

My "Ah ha..." moment from the retreat: I'm doing a pretty good job respecting my boundaries, but I've still got a ways to go to create consistent margin in my life. I need that space around the edges of the pages where I write so much into my life. It's in the margin that those beautiful moments of joy can happen the most.

I was so "present" that I didn't even remember to take photos until most of the group had already left. Darn! I have beautiful pictures in my mind, though, of all the women there and the feeling in the room and the ambiance of Megan's home - and maybe sometimes those pictures in our minds are even better than the ones we stop the action and interrupt our thought-flow to take....

Here are the three photos I took at the end when most people had left:

Here's Paige (long, dark hair and headband), who organized the retreat and helped to present. She did a great job!

Paige took this picture so I could be in one.

Isaac and Eliza in front Megan's beautiful house.

Isaac and Eliza came with me to the retreat and had a great time playing with the sweet baby daughter of our hostess. Ashton babysat the twins at the hotel. They seemed pretty excited to have some uninterrupted TV time and great snacks.

I loved getting this kind note from one of the attendees:

I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for the inspiring info you shared with us during the Power of Moms retreat.  This was my first retreat and I really enjoyed the time out to discuss my profession: motherhood.  I'm very interested in the programs that you are offering on your website and look forward to diving in deeper into the philosophies and ideas you have.  I'm also excited to be linked into a mom group and hope that through it I can continue to learn from other moms and network with other moms in my area.  I'm always working on being a better mom!  Today, Saren, you asked if any of us had a life goal or purpose that we've felt a desire to work on our whole life.  I've been pondering that today and have realized that one of my goals is to help women more fully understand their great and unique potential. I believe most women are in need a good healthy shot of self-esteem.  There is so much good women can do in this world, one of which is raise a happy, functional, righteous family.  I believe that a strong, confident woman, can do extraordinary things. So thanks for encouraging me to contemplate my goals and purpose and move these things forward. 

Part II: Exploring Chicago (this part's by me, Ashton.)

Ok, so after my mom got back from the retreat, we all got out of the hotel and over to an AMAZING authentic Chicago pizzeria. As I like to say, Italy invented pizza, Chicago perfected it. Check our a picture of it over at bit.ly/piiiiiiza. After that, we parked our car at Navy Pier and walked all over Chicago. We went to Millennium Park and saw really pretty gardens and Cloud Gate, aka "The Bean". It is totally awesome modern art that everyone can interact with. We also checked out this really cool amphitheater and listened to a little bit of a concert they were starting there - psychedelic rock - not really my thing. Cool to see so many people there at the concert, though. See some photos below and more by clicking here.

After that, we saw all the skyscrapers (including the Willis Tower). We wished we had time to go up to the top but it was pretty impressive from the bottom. Then, we started heading back to the car and saw the theater district and lots of really cool buildings (my mom liked the old ones, I liked the new ones). We wished we had time for an architecture boat tour but we had to get on the road. We also saw the place where they film the news and weather - they had big windows to the street so we could see in to where they actually do the filming. And the Chicago Tribute building was cool because it had all these pieces of famous buildings from around the world stuck into its walls - like a piece of marble from the Taj Mahal, a piece of carved stone from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, even a piece of granite from the Salt Lake Temple.

All in all, it was a pretty epic day.

Here's the day in photos:

Cool sculpture (one of many) along the bike/walk trail along Lake Michigan (and lots of huge yaughts)

At the Art Institute of Chicago (Liza and Mom were sad it was closed. I wasn't really.)

Gardens by Millennium Park

Amphitheater at Millennium Park

A pro photographer actually told Silas to stay there so she could take his picture there.

Eliza, Isaac, Silas, and Oliver falling in the bean

 

 

Looking up at the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower)

The top of the tower wouldn't fit in the photo above so here it is:

Playing "crack the whip" with a sculpture at Navy Pier.

I love Chicago. I'm gonna need to come back soon. Especially for the pizza.

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Road Trip Day 2: Iowa and Illinois

I've got snoring children sprawled out around me as I sit here in a corner of a hotel room, capturing a little of our day before I get to sleep so I can wake up early for the Chicago Retreat tomorrow morning.

The kids ate themselves silly at the free breakfast buffet at the hotel this morning in Kearney, NE then we spent another whole day driving. The points system Ashton kindly described in the last post held up nicely plus we had church in the car  - everyone picked a story to read aloud from the Friend magazine and we had good discussions about honesty, standing up for what we know in our hearts is right, and other good stuff I can't remember right now. We'd hoped to find a church to go to but our time was super tight because we'd hit so much construction yesterday and we had to get to Chicago...

Observations on Iowa: lots more towns and hills than Nebraska, very green, fields of newly planted crops everywhere, lots of trees and rivers, lots of windmills and a ton of silos. Slower speed limit than Nebraska ): (Iowa was 70, Nebraska and Wyoming were 75)


Observations on Illinois: even more towns, less open space, still very green, bigger wider freeways (with even lower speed limits...) 55-65. Beautiful storm rolling in - but it never actually rained. Great clouds and skies this whole trip.

Random statistics for today:

• Saw 2 burning buildings - a large building and a small house in two different places along the freeway, flames roaring, black smoke like crazy
• Saw about a hundred windmills
• Saw about a thousand grain silos
• Kids had about 25 annoying little disputes about things like Ashton putting his feet up on the seat in front of him, Isaac singing, Eliza making tapping noises, whose turn it was to sit where in the car, who wasn't putting their seatbelt on when they were supposed to.... But those moments passed pretty quickly. Truly, these kids have been very good so far. Until bedtime tonight when they were taking forever to give up and fall asleep and I was really really needing to be done for the day...

Road Trip Day 1: Points System and Happy Times in the Van

This is Ashton, Saren’s oldest child. I'm in charge of the blog while my mom drives. Yesterday, we drove through Wyoming and Nebraska. They are very big states and the trip was very long. We made our 12 hours in the car as fun as possible with a points system.

It went like this; writing a page, reading ten pages in a book, or doing three pages in a math workbook gives you a point each. Once you got to five points, you could choose between a candy bar, sitting in shotgun, or 30 minutes of playing on the Kindle Fire.

Eliza chose to sit in the front and play on the Kindle, Oliver, Silas, and Isaac all chose Kindle time, and I chose a candy bar. The person in shotgun was in charge of keeping track of points on a small notebook.

While we were driving, and our mom was on the phone, Oliver suddenly announced that he needed to go to the bathroom. Immediately. #2.

We pulled over and... well, let's just say that every car that passed us got quite a laugh when they saw Ollie mooning them. We're just glad he took care o' business  outside of the car instead of inside.

People seemed pretty happy and got stuff done with the point system. We had a lot of good snacks (thanks to Kashi for sending a HUGE box of deliciousness and Subway for buying us lunch. Kashi and Subway are our partial sponsors of this trip). We stopped in Cheyenne to see the capitol, and then we were on our way again. Check out our progress in pictures by clicking here: . We'll be posting several pictures and updates a day.

Random Statistics:
Today we saw...

• Nine trains (longest one was 85 cars)
• Fort Bridger (we looked up some stuff about it but didn't stop. It's where all the pioneers and mountain men did their trading and shopping)
• an R, an M, an E, and a GR on the mountains
• a mountain tunnel
• castle rocks (big turrets of rocks that stuck out of Wyomian mountains)
• Rolands (where our great grandpa grew up)
• Towns with with wierd names: Road Wamsutter, Medicine Bow, Wahoo
• Continental Divide