Friday, November 9

Ok, we have to go back in time a little! I realized that I didn't write about the field trip I took with Rachel's class. We went to Plimouth Plantation - a living history museum of the Plimouth settlement in the year 1627. It was a terrific trip! I was so excited about getting to go because of my years teaching third grade. We used to study the first Thanksgiving and show a video about Plimouth Plantation. The books Sarah Morton's Day and Samuel Eaton's Day were also made from photographs taken there. This year I actually got to go and experience the real thing! Rachel and I enjoyed it so much, we took the boys back on Monday (Veteran's Day).

They had a good time too! I really could have stayed all day long and just talked to the "re creators" and asked question after question!! Tim and Jamie got into a long conversation with a man putting the thatched roof on a new house.

Rachel's favorite part was the Wampanoag home site - the recreation of the home site of the man the Wampanoag leaders sent to Plimouth as an "ambassador" of sorts.

The kids also got to try their hands at some colonial games.

Let it snow!!

Tuesday, November 20












We got our first snowfall today!! There were snow showers that started at around 10:30 and lasted until about 1:00. There wasn't much accumulation because it was above freezing - so the final results looked like an Alabama snow (just in November).















My mom is here visiting for Thanksgiving, and we were at TJ Maxx when it started. Other people in the check-out line were groaning at the snow, but we were excited! Mom says that we're probably the only aduts in town excited to see the snow. She ate lunch at school with Rachel today and said that the girls were all so excited. They went out for recess after lunch and Rachel later told me that they built two very small snowmen. David enjoyed the snow too. We had a friend with us today and the boys had a great time making footprints on the driveway!


This past weekend, Jamie and Tim went for their first campout with the Boy Scouts here. It was a chiller!!












The troop has land up in New Hampshire, and the low on Saturday night was around 25. So, Jamie has earned his polar badge for camping in below freezing temperatures. The other parents told Tim that that wasn't cold. It's really cold on the February freeze campout!!
Tim says that Jamie had a very good time and made some good connections with some of the boys in his troop. I'm so glad that he is finding a place here!


Also on Saturday night was the International Festival at Sloan. It was a terrific party where the fellows made booths with decorations, information, and most importantly - food- from their home countries. The children were given "passports" which were signed by the person manning each booth. Rachel had a great time going all over the world! Tim and I ate way too much!! I tried to go easy and ask each fellow which offering was his/her favorite food, but they all said, "You have to try everything!" So, even limiting myself to only a bite of each, I still got stuffed. We even had Turkish Delight from Turkey!! It was much better than what I had made for supper club last year! This was more like a bland jellybean covered in powdered sugar. There was also chocolate Turkish Delight, but I didn't get a piece of that. My favorite thing was the Bakalava!!









Mom arrived on Sunday, and we took her to eat at Bertucci's - one of our favorite places here (even if it is a chain). On Monday, Mom and I got to go to a lecture/lunch at MIT. The speaker was from the Media Lab at MIT and has done a lot of work with music and technology. He was fascinating!! Mom got to meet several of the fellows at the lunch. She also got the experience of riding the "T", but her expreience was actually too good. We had an almost perfect trip - not too crowded and not having to wait for the buses and train.

Tuesday, November 6

Ok, it has been two very busy weeks!!

My Uncle Steve (Jabe) from Silverhill, AL was in town for a conference. So he came over for dinner on Thursday, Oct 25. We had a very nice visit over some delicious potato soup (my first of the season). We also had Don (our landlord) up for dinner. The conversation was very interesting and we lingered at the table over coffee and pumpkin cake.

The MIT Children's Halloween party(Sat, Oct.27) was a great success.

Even though it was raining the whole day. We had over 50 children and their parents attend. The kids seemed to have a good time eating, playing the games, and joining in the costume parade around the student center. They even learned the songs "5 Little Pumpkins" and "The Old Woman All Skin and Bones". Jamie was a big hit as the mad scientist!!

On Monday, the kids and I set to work carving our pumpkins. We called the family from Finland to see if they wanted to join us to see how to do it. It's funny to think that traditions that are so common here aren't held all over. But, they had never carved pumpkins before.
They eagerly accepted the invitation. So, we had 2 moms and 5 kids carving 4 pumpkins. Minna said the the inside of the pumpkin was totally different from what she had expected.
David's pumpkin was a Mickey face, Jamie's was a frog, and Rachel's was scary. It was a lot of fun to share the tradition with a new family. Minna says that her daughter, Kia, loves Halloween and wants to know how many more days till the next one.

The adult Halloween party (on Tuesday) was also a lot of fun. It was at a candle pin bowling alley. I was a little leary of the venue at first, but it was a very fun party! Candle pin bowling was fun - it's a smaller ball with no finger holes and you get three balls per frame. My score wasn't much better than in regular bowling, though. The shoes - are the same glorious things!!
Tim and I went as Gandalf and Galadriel from Lord of the Rings. Our costumes were fairly well received, but many of our foreign fellows were unfamiliar with the characters.

Tim's Uncle Marvin passed away this week. So, he made a mad dash home to Alabama for the funeral. He really enjoyed seeing everyone. It was his first trip back south in about 6 months - almost as long as he was in Japan in '91. His most interesting comment was that all of the raido dj's sounded weird! He has grown accustomed to hearing that New England accent over the airways. I, on the other hand, occasionally tune in to the streaming audio of "Rick and Bubba" just to get an earful of home.

Halloween was fun. Both Jamie and Rachel had half-days of school (they will for the rest of the month to allow for parent/teacher conferences). We had a skype call with Grannie, Beth, JT and Aunt Kiki to let the kids see each other in costume. This is the first year they haven't been with them for at least a pre-Halloween party. Afterward, we went to my friend Susan's house for pizza and trick-or-treating.

There are two differences I noticed in trick-or-treating in Belmont vs Hartselle or Cullman:

1) we had to climb stairs to get to almost every house, and 2) the kind of loot you get. The kids all came home with multiple full-sized chocolate bars, and the rest of their candy is probably 80% chocolate!! Yummy, but mom has hit the bags too hard. I just can't bear to see all those Reeces cups go to waste, since none of my kids like them!! To finish off the evening, we stopped in on Jan and Don. They were glad to see the kids in their costumes, and even took a couple of photos. We have been so blessed by our housing situation here!!

Tim came home on Thursday night, but had to leave for England Friday morning for his friend Paul's retirement celebration.
Friday night was the MIT Japanese party. There are a lot of Japanese families in the Sloan Fellows! They served sushi, California rolls, teryaki chicken, Kirin beer, moshi, and Japanese desserts. Rachel really liked the teryaki chicken! I experimented with several kinds of sushi and California rolls. David didn't eat anything! Rachel ended up going home with Esther, a Sloan kid from Brazil, to spend the night and all day Saturday.

It was cold and rainy all day on Saturday (Nov3)!! We started our day with a trip to the food pantry to donate the canned food we collected at the children's Halloween party. (Jamie has to do 12 hours of community service for school this year. I think it's great!! Jamie keeps asking me if it's legal for the school to force them to do community service. What a cheerful giver! That afternoon, the boys and I went to see The Bee Movie with some friends from Korea. It was cute, but not just fabulous. We ended the day with a trip to the mall and dinner at McDonald's. Then we picked up Rachel and headed home.

Sunday, Nov.4, we got up and went to church. The sermon was really good this Sunday. It was about Zaccheaus and how his story opens the doors to all people, no matter what their past or present circumstances. Then we had communion and sang "One Bread, One Body" - a hymn I actually knew!! The church is going to do a couple of Wednesday night classes on keeping proper focus during the holidays, and I hope to go. After lunch, we went out to the Belmont Habitat ( an Audubon nature preserve) to help with the fall trails day - to get more community service hours in. We all enjoyed working outside. Tim was back home when we got back home, and was ready to get outside for awhile. So, we went to Middlesex Fells to do a little hiking before dark. We hiked up to a tower and were rewarded with a fabulous view of Boston right at sunset. We ate dinner at Chili's - the closest thing to Las Vias' chips and salsa we've found up here. Then we went to Jordan's Furniture. Sound like a strange destination? Well, it's more like an amusement park than a furniture store!! Inside are an IMAX theater, a trapeze school, Fudruckers, an ice cream parlor (they had pumpkin ice cream!!), a huge candy store, some arcade games, strollers that are like taxis, and a musical fountain show (like at Disney Epcot) with lights and music and "liquid fireworks". It was really amazing!! Oh, there was also a recreation of Boston Public garden, the capital, and Fenway's green monster - all done in Jelly Bellys. It makes me want to buy some furniture!! We did walk around and look at furniture a little, and the kids all found new bedroom furniture they want to have back in Alabama. I think that we'll wait until March to buy, though. This is the place that promised that any furniture purchased last March would be free if the Red Sox won the World Series. I wonder if they'll do it again. . .
Speaking of the Sox, the McKelvy's have all caught Red Sox fever. Especially Jamie! He watched parts of several games in the division championship and the world series. The world series games were all on late, though, they started at 8:30 Boston time. Tim and I stayed up late several nights watching to see how our team would do. Jamie even worked out a system with Tim to leave the hall lights on if the Sox won and turn them off if they lost. That's one thing we'll definitely be bringing back home to Alabama - baseball team we root for.