Woody came to visit on Halloween!

It was a super simple costume to put together. I used this tutorial for the Woody vest. It only took about 20 minutes!

He had so much fun riding his horse and handing out candy to all the “Mick or Treaters!” He really got the hang of it by the end of the night!

For my 26th birthday, my parents gave me the best present ever- a plane ticket to Boston…and back! Lisa has been up there for almost two months now, so it was great to have my own personal tour guide. She lives in swanky Brookline, so we had lots of fun exploring the neighborhood and checking out the crazy houses of her rich neighbors. They know how to do it in Brookline! Oh, you’d like to tour her street? I’m so glad you asked.

Just a few doors down is the Ronald McDonald House

The lawn and garden were so pretty! Lots of pumpkins outside in celebration of fall, too! On the left, you can see some little white posts. That’s a vegetable garden! There were tons of tomatoes in there that looked almost ready to be picked.

Next door to Ronald is the Yawkey Family Inn

This house has an amazing history, check out the link to learn more about it! It was built in the 1880s and was a fraternity house from the 1920s through 2005. It is absolutely beautiful. There’s even a statue of a golden retriever out front. You can kind of see it on the left under the tree. Lisa says there’s always kids playing with it and posing for pictures with it. This house is HUGE.

Moving on to San Marino, California to visit our good friends, George and Nina Banks.

This house looks like it is straight out of Father of the Bride. Am I right, Virginia?? It has four fireplaces and must look good in Christmas lights. I wonder how many Christmas lights there will be in Brookline?

Next up is one of Lisa’s favorites

Isn’t the garden great!? Love it. Looking at this picture makes me want to take off my shoes and walk around in that grass barefoot- something unthinkable on Florida’s St. Augustine grass!

We had lots of fun poking around downtown and had an amazing Italian feast in the North End with two of Lisa’s classmates  for dinner. Saturday morning, we went back downtown and did a little more exploring. There were probably a few hundred people running around the city in matching t shirts. They looked like they were on some sort of scavenger hunt. Well, after some googling, we found out they were. A treasure hunt for a $20,000 engagement ring! We totally should have done it. Not that we are in the market for one or really know our way around Boston or anything.

We took a peek in the Granary Burial Ground.

It is so great to be in a town with so much history. There’s not much history like this in Florida considering the fact that the rest of the country pretty much ignored the state until air conditioning came around.

Salley May, wife of Enoch May. Halloweenie looking, right?

I thought this was a sweet looking angel.

On Sunday, we went to mass at Lisa’s beautiful church and then hightailed it up to Newburyport to see Uncle Paul, Jack, and Ian! It was a dreary, cold, misty/rainy day, but we had TONS of fun picking apples. I know I have been apple picking before, but I can’t remember it, so I was really excited to go!

First we popped into the barn to check out the apple cider donut making process. Ian and Lisa approve.

We set off up the hill and right away got to my favorite, Royal Gala, perfect!

We had lots of samples along the way.

Here’s the hayride that we seemed to miss on both the way up and down the hill

That’s ok, we have legs that work.

This apple was HUGE. As Uncle Paul put it, a $3 apple. Please note the equally huge worm hole in it.

And now, an apple joke brought to you by Uncle Paul. What is worse than finding a worm in your apple??

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Do you know?

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Finding half a worm in your apple.

HAHAHA! You’ve got to love apple humor.

It was a great trip! Thanks Mom, Dad, Lisa, Uncle Paul, Jack, and Ian for such a fun weekend!

Here I am, getting behind again. Nathan’s birthday! He turned 28 last month, meaning he is REALLY in his late twenties now, if there was any confusion about that before. Meanwhile I’m still fully enjoying myself in my mid twenties. We wanted to do something fun to celebrate so we packed up and went to Downtown Disney for the day. It was Charlie’s first Disney experience! Let me tell you, he loved every minute of it… Until we got the biggest sundae ever from Ghiradelli’s and he decided right then and there would be the most opportune time for a total toddler meltdown. That is neither here nor there. We had a great day!

Charlie loved the Lego store. Here’s the birthday boy, little boy, and “Woowie,” himself! Toy Story 1 and 3 are Charlie’s most favorite movies (and pretty much the only movies he’s seen), so he was excited to see how HUGE Woowie is in “real life.” At this point, Woowie was his favorite. Sorry Woowie, move over. Buzz is now number one in Charlie’s heart.

Here we are with our new family: a pirate boy, fancy girl, mouse woman, and goofy where’s Waldo. And their herd of dogs. Charlie fits right in.

How do you get to be one of the professional Lego builders? That profession is right up there with nail polish namer and cupcake taster.

We had lunch at that seafood place that is a fake boat. Charlie flirted with the waitress and then ate half of my shrimp po boy. The boy loves his shrimp!

We went in every store and Charlie played with every single toy in every one of those stores. We spent over an hour in some of them! Can you believe we didn’t buy anything? The lure of Disney has nothing on us!

It was a great day. Charlie was so good and didn’t even have a name. We were actually surprised that the meltdown didn’t happen until 3:00! He must be a professional tourist in training.

Remember when I said I wanted to get the top cabinets done by the end of the weekend? Change of plans! Let’s start from the beginning. I took down all the top doors and propped them up on the boxes our wedding china came in…It was the only thing that I had enough of to keep them off the ground so I could paint!

Here they are in action with their first coat of paint on the back.

I realized that things were moving along quicker than I thought they would! I finished up the top cabinets- two coats of paint and one top coat layer- looking good!

Here is a closer view.

By Thursday, I was basically done with the top doors. I just had to wait for the top coat to dry; it takes 12 hours before you can hang them up. I was so happy with how everything was going that I decided to start on the bottom cabinets and figure out what to do with Charlie later.

At this point, I was SO tired of painting. I had been doing it nonstop for over 8 hours the past two days. It was encouraging to see the frames starting to look “real,” though! It was time for me to go get Charlie and I still had no idea of what to do about those bottom cabinets. I saw his huge pad of paper on the kitchen table and viola! A solution!

Surprisingly, it worked! Charlie didn’t even try to go in there! He did have one incident of leaning on a cabinet “door” and falling through, but I was right there to catch him before he ended up totally in the cabinet

I also started to put up some of the doors that were dry. Looking so good!

The end seemed to take the longest because there was a lot of drying time in between each coat and I didn’t have anything else to paint (the frames). After what seemed like FOREVER- I finished painting the final coats on Saturday- I was done! And yes, you read that right. I did the entire project by myself. It would definitely go much faster with another person, but Nathan was really busy at work last week, so I just kept trucking! Nathan was a HUGE help with the hardware. He got all the knobs and pulls on by Sunday afternoon.

This was a great thing to wake up to this morning!

And another view…

And another!

I am so so happy with the result and can’t wait the 5-6 days that it takes to cure. Everything it still a little soft and you have to be careful not to scratch it when you pull a knob! There are still a few things we need to do. We’re going to be removing the curved shelves on the top and hopefully putting some open shelving in between the cabinets and curtains there. I also still need to do the very bottom of the cabinets, but I seriously needed a break from painting! Hopefully we’ll get a new oven/microwave within the next year or so. Very exciting! What do you think?