Those east coast girls are hip...

Harrison got to learn firsthand just how cool Boston girls can be when we went and visited Brenda and Robin over the weekend. We had so much fun and my only regret is that I somehow walked away without getting a picture of Robin and Harrison together. Sad. Things started out well with H-man proving himself to be an enjoyable travel companion. He was especially willing to get the feel of New York during our short layover by laying down in the grime of JFK airport.

As Brenda pointed out, I really am more of a laid-back mom than I realize. The picture does not do the filth of that floor justice.

Once we got there, we headed out to Boston's North End, where we stopped at Mike's Pastry Shop to load up on cannoli. (I'm really glad I checked that on dictionary.com--can you believe that's the plural form--singular is cannolo. Oh, and if you haven't had one, here's the definition [which doesn't taste nearly as good]: tubular pastry shells stuffed with a sweetened filling of whipped ricotta and often containing nuts, citron, or bits of chocolate. )

Mmmm. Bren Bren knows how to treat weary travelers. To make a long, sad story a little shorter, this is the point in the trip that Harrison started experiencing (I'm guessing here) some emotional trauma from all the unusual-ness of the trip. We had a long string of melt-downs for the next couple of days. Luckily, he's an excellent sleeper and I had brought along a few Baby Einsteins, so he was able to achieve a little stability.

Plus, our hostesses were fantastic at distracting him and helping him calm down. Having piles of dirty old snow to offer him worked in their favor.

Overall, it was really relaxing and a good catch-up for me. It'd been way too long since I'd stayed up way too late talking about way too lot of nothing while eating way too much junk food. (Your homemade carrot cake counts as a vegetable though, right Rob?)

Obviously, Harrison got in on the girly stuff too.

Anyway, after a couple of days at Bren and Robin's, we got to hang out at Aunt Trish and Uncle Scott's house. H-man immediately felt at ease there. They had pulled out all kinds of fantastic toys that he couldn't get enough of. He also seemed to automatically bond with cousin Nick. He just kept pointing at him and smiling.

As always, I was completely impressed by my little cousins. Sometimes I forget how young they are when I'm talking to them because they are so on-the-ball. We played a rousing game of "Park-N-Shop" that Michaela handily won while Anna had one of the worst strings of luck I've ever seen in a board game. I wish we could have had more time together; it was such a treat.

Harrison also took to the Morrow's cat, Princess. I'm not sure which he liked more, Princess or her chair.

Everything ended well, and even though we had several hours' worth of delays, Harrison stayed happy the whole way home. That's more than I could have hoped for. Check him out watching the planes. He loved it.