The Strawberry festival at Smolak Farms has been extended to include both this weekend and next weekend! I’m hoping that the rain will stop at some point, so we can get out to the farm!
Are there any other local farm festivals that we should know about? Leave a comment!
Tags: farm | Comment (0)What: Endicott Park Day In Danvers
When: June 20, 2009 11:00 AM
Official Website: Endicott Park Day 2009
Occurs at: Endicott Park
Location: Forest Street, Danvers, MA, 01923 map
Phone:(978) 777-0001
Date: Saturday, June 20, 2009
Hours: Fireman’s Muster at 9; Festival 11am-3pm
Ages: Infants, Toddlers, Kids, Teens, Adults
In/Outdoor: Outdoor
Cost: Free see below
Join the happy hordes at Endicott Park in Danvers for Endicott Park Day. From the Doll Carriage Parade to face painting & temporary tattoos, to pony rides and other kids activities, demonstrations, and rides, there’s something for everyone.
Bring an appetite, as a wide variety of food is available from fried dough to grilled food from Kelly’s Roast Beef, and finish with a sundae for dessert.
Event Schedule
8:30 – 10:30 am Apple Pie & Open Variety Pie Contest entries to be delivered
11 am -3 pm Rides, Demonstrations, Grill, Vendors
11:00 am Pie Judging begins
11 am - 3 pm Shiyanne’s Tea Party
11:00 am Doll Carriage Registration
11 am – 3pm Tug of War Tournament
11 am – 3pm FUN Games by: The Danvers Recreation Department
11:30 pm Doll Carriage Parade
12:30-1:15 pm Johnny the K Show
2:30 pm Pie Baking Contest Winner announced
If you’re interested in learning more about sustainable living, you should stop by the Living Green & Renewable Energy Fair this Saturday, June 13th at Salem’s Old Town Hall. The fair will be held from 10am to 3pm. Among many other things, there will be solar powered toys on display.
A series of lectures will help you learn how to find green materials for renovations, how to be green by eating green and how to use solar energy in your home.
Your kids will love the “Kids Green Scene” where they can take part in earth friendly activities. Sponsored by Crunchy Granola Baby, you’ll find a place to relax while soaking in all the great information at hand.
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I am excitedly awaiting my next family-friendly adventure: strawberry picking. My son, who’s now 3.5 years old, is old enough to recognize ripe strawberries and I anticipate that he will actually be helpful this year instead of just a tag-a-long. Well, not so much a tag-a-long as kid-who-just-wants-to-eat-strawberry-shortcake.
Last year we went to the Strawberry Festival at Smolak Farms in North Andover. By the time we arrived, most of the pick-your-own strawberries were gone; the field had been picked out. It took me quite some time to find a section that had been overlooked and I filled one or two pint-sized buckets. My son managed to add many unripe strawberries to the batch. Back at the farm house, there were strawberry shortcake and local folk musicians… each alone is enough to make my day!
With all the rain we’ve had this year, I am hopeful that the strawberry crop will be abundant. We plan to attend Smolak Farm’s strawberry festival on June 20th and 21st. This year, however, I plan on either picking during the week, or early, early in the morning!
Many other local farms have fields of pick-your-own produce… after all, it’s saves them a lot of labor to have you doing all the work for them! At www.pickyourown.org and mass.gov you can find listings of local farms. Additionally, you can find reviews of several Essex county farms here on North Shore Parenting.
Tags: farm, pick your own | Comment (0)I like little adventures… trips that get me out of the house, but allow me to tuck myself into my own bed at the end of the day. I’m also a full time graduate student and have a three-year-old and seven-month-old at home. I’m with the kids one or two days a week, and usually we stay close to the house–there are a lot of chores that need to get done. Today, however, as I was driving my son home from pre-school, we started talking about fish and frogs. We discussed having fish as pets and putting together a home aquarium. I briefly entertained the thought of heading over to a pet store and picking up a small aquarium and a couple of fish. But then I remembered all the work involved in setting up a tank, including the several day wait to make sure that the water was properly primed for inhabitants. A much better plan entered my mind– a visit to the New England Aquarium.
As a Swampscott resident, it was easy for us to zip down to the Wonderland stop on the Blue line of the MBTA. The train ride was fast, and in no time we were standing at the Information Desk renewing our family membership.
I could not believe how quiet the aquarium was at 3:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon. It was incredibly nice! We usually visit on the weekend, and it’s so crowded you can barely see the penguins, no less find a quiet spot to observe all the big fish in the large tank. But today there we no problems! We explored until closing time at 5pm. Then, a stop at The Panera across from Rowe’s Wharf, train ride home, and we were home by 6:30pm.
My son loved the adventure, the baby just soaked it all in, and I wasn’t completly exhausted. Perfect!
Tags: aquarium, Boston | Comment (0)
Kristine Foley Photography is Now Offering Discounted Rates on Family Portrait Sessions!
Reserve one of the dates listed below to take advantage of our Portrait Special:
• 1 hour of photography with proofs for $200
• 2 hours of photography with proofs for $400
2009 Portrait Sessions will be held in Wakefield Common on the following dates this year:
July 11th & 12th
July 25th & 26th
Email Kristine today to reserve a date or to receive more information. Portrait sessions and photos make great gifts for family!
Please check out her work at: www.kfoleyphotography.com or www.kristinefoley.wordpress.com
To reserve your spot, email kristine@kfoleyphotography.com.
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I visited the new Trader Joes store on Route 1 in Saugus for a serious shopping trip this morning. I had been a week ago to stock up on party food and was impressed by the size of the new store.
The Trader Joes in Swampscott was my first destination for groceries when we moved to the area five and a half years ago. In fact, when the news broke in January that they would be closing the store, I was so disappointed that I boycotted TJ’s and went over to Stop and Shop to familiarize myself with their food offerings. Stop and Shop has a nice organic and natural food section– but I wondered why it was set apart from the rest of the store. My cynical opinion is that the prices in the organic section are so much higher than the rest of the store that consumers would “naturally” go for the conventional option.
Well, back to the new TJ’s: first, it was really annoying having to drive South on Route 1, for 1.5 miles, after I passed the store. I was coming from Walnut Street, so perhaps some local can tell me if there are any shortcuts I can take to get on the right side of Route 1.
The store itself was pretty crowded, but thanks to the wide aisles there were no problems getting around. They had all the selection I expected; more perhaps than the Swampscott store because of all the extra space. The produce looked great… I consider TJ’s the weakest in this area, because Whole Foods is just a couple of miles from me and they excel in their fruits and veggies. I was able to find apples that were grown in Vermont; a bonus for a “eat local” proponent such as myself.
All in all, I liked the new store. The products were exactly what I expected from a Trader Joes store, with an expanded produce and meat section from the closed store in Swampscott. The place was bustling, which is good news for them, but there was enough space to move around the place, and when lines built up at the two open registers, bells were rung and employees rushed to the checkouts to take care of everyone. So, as my son will say with gusto: “Good Job Trader Joes!”
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We saw this product, the “Fitness Fun - My Treadmill” by International Playthings, when we stopped by Magic Beans in Brookline on Saturday. I asked my three-year-old to try it out for fun, but he wasn’t too interested in it. It looks like we are not the only people whose eye it caught: there’s an article up on boston.com about the trend of selling fitness equipment to children. Did you ever see this? It’s the Fisher Price Smart Cyle, which allows kids to play a video game only when their little legs are pumping away.
What do you think about these products? Personally, I think they are things that optimistic parents and grand-parents might buy their kids, but will be left to collect dust in favor of other (more passive) entertainment. Can you imagine telling your kids: “No TV until you spend 5 minutes on the treadmill!!”
| Comment (0)“Pour Some Sugar on Me” has now turned into “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, The Old Man is Snoring”. In the eight months that have passed since my son was born, my IPOD has been quickly turning from a collection of rock music to a collection of children’s music. My son absolutely loves music, and gets so excited whenever he hears it. He kicks his legs, thrashes his arms, and smiles with that one big giant front tooth. It gets me every time! We try to find a way to incorporate music into our everyday activities. He has a certain bath time CD that he listens to every time he is in the tub, and splashes all over the place. We sing in the morning and in the evening, and I don’t think he owns a toy that doesn’t make music or that he doesn’t try to bang on to make music.
One of our favorite things to do together is take part in a program called “Kindermusik with Friends” located in Beverly Farms. It is a program that gives my son and I some great time to bond together. We play with different instruments, sing, dance, and we even learned a polka! My son loves when I sing to him (he is the only person in the world that enjoys my singing!) and I love holding him when we dance together. It is a music and movement class, that has turned out to be much more than that.
My son was born five weeks early, and his physical development was slightly lagging. I was trying to find a program that we could enjoy together that might help. We started Kindermusik when my son was 3 months old, and what a blessing it has been! Not only have the classes been fun and entertaining, but they have also helped in my son’s development. Every class, the teacher makes a point to talk about child development and has a great way of incorporating activities that are fun and are beneficial to babies’ development. From class to class, I can see a change in my son and even the other moms in class comment on his changes. He has also made many friends in class, several who have been in class since we first started.
We just signed up for two more classes in the fall. One is a “Sing and Sign” class that two of his little buddies are also taking. The other moms and I are really excited to see how the babies use it to communicate with each other!
They offer lots of classes and curriculums, so anyone who has a child that loves music, or is looking for something fun and different to do with your child, I highly recommend “Kindermusik with Friends”. For more information, go to http://kindermusikwithfriends.kindermusik.net/Index.html
and then, a few days later, I exchanged them for Diego. When I was in the diaper aisle of Target, with my son singing the Dora theme song next to me, I was overcome with frustration on how characters and gender-roles are forced onto our kids. And so I proudly put Dora into my cart. Because of a particular promotion they were having, I grabbed a box of Diego too and headed for the checkout lines. Unfortunately, I grabbed a box that was two sizes too large, and when I went back for the exchange, I traded Dora and too-big Diego for two boxes of just-right Diego. My husband wasn’t pleased with the pink, and I honestly didn’t think I could send my son to daycare in pink plastic undies.
First of all, I hate the idea of disposable training pants. Last year, when my son was but one and a half years old, I sent the following note to the NSP mailing list:
Nowadays they are selling disposable training pants that change color or get cold when a child has wet themselves…. because the disposable training pants absorb the wetness so well that the kids don’t realize what has just happened. Personally, I think that wet cloth diapers/training pants send the same signal!
I plan on using cloth training pants when my son Evan is ready for toilet training. Evan is 21 months old, and as much as I would LOVE for it to happen now, he’s not showing the signs of being ready. At the pace we’re going now, I don’t think it’s going to happen until he’s at least 2 1/4 years old.
So, with the best intentions, I got a few thick cloth training pants, hoping my son would “get the message” and decide on his own to keep them clean. And there was a lot of encouragement from myself and his father, which turned into power struggles and stubborness and the actual request to wear diapers because it was so much easier for him. I never made the complete switch to cloth– disposable was so much more convenient.
I’m done buying diapers, and I don’t like pull-ups, but for the time being, I’m stuck with them.
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