The great escape

I will never cease to be so grateful that we have family relatively close. The girls and I needed to get out of Vineland badly (I'm not a fan of this rotation). We headed up to Boston/New Hampshire to visit our cousins during their spring break. We were really hoping Karla would have her baby during our visit. Lucky for us, a 24-hour bug spread like wild-fire and dehydrated her just enough to put her in a short four-hour labor...lucky girl. We were thrilled to be there to see James Paul Pratt make his grand entrance into the world (well we didn't actually witness his entrance although it would have been a hoot). 

I drove up in record time, 6 hours! A good 1 hr 15 min faster than normal. The girls were champs. I dropped Leah and Paige off at Amber Lee's, was there for only an hour and then headed to Boston with Sydney. That hour was apparently long enough to for me to catch the bug (it laid dormant a couple days). 

Karla and I had a grand time together in Brookline, I loved being in a big city again and felt right at home amongst all the people and dogs. We hit up two new finds in her area; Durados, for some fabulous fish tacos and then a cute bakery.

 This bakery is apparently where many Harvard drop-outs work. They take their bread seriously. It is a small place- think Soup Nazis. I set Syd down for one second to get money out of my purse. In that second, she grabbed a loaf of bread. All the workers gave me the evil eye...like really evil eye. So I asked if they wanted me to buy it. They all just shook their heads. So I grabbed it and walked up to the register and said, "I'll take this too. This olive loaf." Olive loaf!? There was a beautiful rosemary loaf right next to it comon' Syd- olives!

We quickly left as we were obviously not welcomed with three small babies. Syd carried her loaf to the park, took one bite and threw it to the ground! The look of disgust was awesome...we laughed so hard! We did score some pretty good treats though. Karla's was heavenly!

Thomas got a kick out of Syd enjoying her olive loaf

Karla enjoying her $6 pudding cake

Dave treated us to a Japanese hibachi grill...another scene with the kiddos!

Saturday morning I was supposed to go for a ten-mile run around the Boston harbor, I was so excited for it. I woke up feeling queasy but put my running clothes on and made it to the end of their street. The rest of the day I was sick and kind enough to leave the bug for Karla, who got it two days later and botta-boom-botta-bing out came a baby!

Paige and James Paul

We were so happy to be in town to welcome this sweet little guy

I headed back up to New Hampshire to hang with the Jensens. I love watching these kids play together. They enjoy one-another so much and are all filled with so much creativity! They did a slip'n'slide in loved every freezing second of it. We roasted s'mores, played baseball, wrestled on the tramp, went to the YMCA (where Sydney screamed for 40 min), went to their cute library, and I got to stay up late chatting and laughing with Ryan and Amber Lee. It felt good to laugh until I cried. 

Every day someone else was down for the count, including Ryan- on his birthday (Happy Birthday to you -eh?),  so we just made the most of things and had to change many of our previous plans for each day but we still had a blast.

I cannot believe these kids actually did this...it was kind of warm.

Aubs at the bat

Leah giving one happy Thomas a ride.

Cousins