The Four-Year-Old, as the cop walks away from the car after giving her mother a ticket for an illegal right turn: “Where do we get to go now, Mommyo?”
Mother: “What do you mean?”
The Four-Year-Old: “What’s the ticket to? Is it to SteveSongs?”
Last weekend, while the citizens of Caterpickles Central were driving around Massachusetts in yet another attempt to find good Mexican food, we passed through a little town called Walpole. The Four-Year-Old, thought that was a pretty weird thing to call a town. “Why do they call it Walpole?”
At the beginning of the summer, my daughter asked me where she could go to dig for dinosaur bones. We had visited the tracks at the Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop as well as the Dinosaur Footprints at Holyoke, MA last fall, and my daughter wasn’t interested in simply going to see more footprints. She wanted bones. And she wanted to dig up least two of them, so that she could keep one for herself and give the other to the Museum of Science.
Signs posted around Jamaica Pond declare it to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace. For years, I had assumed from this that it was a man-made pond, dug under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted. In fact, the 68-acre 53-foot deep kettle pond was carved out by glaciers millions of years before there was a Boston or a Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape it.
Another in our ongoing series: What We Did This Summer. Capron Park Zoo is a beautifully maintained mini-zoo (think park with creatures) in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Walking…
Last spring, when I was experiencing an extreme case of Cape deprivation, my husband and daughter very kindly agreed to come with me on a day-trip to the Cape. We decided to visit the Sandwich Glass Museum because it was one of those things that we had wanted to see on our vacation in the Cape the previous summer, but which we had somehow never quite gotten around to. Funny how a live glass-blowing demonstration sounds more appealing on a drizzly 42 degree March day than it does on a sunny 95 degree August one.
In which my daughter makes effective use of literalism and a long pause.
Another in our ongoing series, What We Did This Summer. (Yeah, I know this is clearly What We Did this Spring, but our family considers our…
When my daughter graduated from purees to Cheerios in late 2008, I suddenly found myself carrying around a lot of snacks. The demand for snack totage has only increased as my daughter has gotten older and the length of time we can be out in the world on a single trip has increased. Tired of carrying single purpose Ziplocs, I decided to find a better option. Eco Lunch Gear offers a variety of reusable fabric snack bags, sandwich wraps, and lunch bags in cheerful and occasionally conservative prints.
While we were tooling around the Monadnock region this summer, we stumbled upon the Magic Flute Toy Shop, a rather amazing toy store hidden behind an unassuming store front in a strip mall in Peterborough, NH, about thirty minutes northeast of Hillsborough.
CATERPICKLES 