The Young Americans...

Hallowe'en costumes: the bad bunny and a singer from Kiss

As requested, this blog is filled chock-full with images of the younger Parrys and focuses upon their new lives.

A direct consequence of our current lack of furniture (apart from the enormous green beanbag) has been the time we have spent 'out-and-about'. Within Cambridge alone there are tens of parks and we have already discovered those parks which Iola considers to have the best swings, the highest slides, the most complicated climbing frames... We're still figuring out local bus routes and the different coloured "T" lines, but we normally end up where we intended to go, or have a discussion on the beauty of serendipity and circumstance. 

We have moved to a child-friendly area with parks and trees and relatively slow-moving traffic and people who stop and talk to the girls and let Iola stroke their dogs... The girls have become accustomed to chatting away to people, any people, whom they meet in the street: why are you digging up those weeds but not those plants? How old is your dog? Where do you live? How many people live in your house? People haven't begun to avoid us (yet). 

Our new house

Boston  relies heavily on tourism, and the prices of museums and main attractions tend to reflect this. However, locals have tipped us off on the best places to have an annual membership, and the price for this tends to be not much more than the cost of a single visit. We now have membership to the New England Aquarium. Today (no school because it's Eid Al Adha - 'Eid Mubarak!') the girls took advantage of looking cute and having "adorable English accents" and were invited into the seal pen to play with the fur seals. Magic! The seals waved for them and ended their show with a big wet fishy kiss for both the girls.

We've also joined the Museum of Science, but we haven't managed to see more than about a third of the exhibits despite returning twice already. Maya's favourite exhibit is the Van de Graaf generator which shoots lightning at the presenter while he stands in a metal cage, apparently thereby proving that you're fine in a car in a thunder storm. It seems a tad reckless to me. Iola enjoyed dissecting and inflating a pair of sheep's lungs on our most recent visit. My favourite part so far is the virtual aquarium where children spend ages designing their own fish, writing their names on them, and then watching them be devoured by a virtual shark (the girls assure me that the fish is then reborn out of a pirate's treasure chest as an angel fish... I love science).

As one-off trips, we have been down to Plymouth to see the replica of the Mayflower, to learn about the Mayflower pilgrims through reenactments at the Plimoth Plantation, and to spend time with the Wampanoag tribe learning about the Native Americans.

We also had a one-off visit to the Children's Museum where Iola instantly disappeared into the four-storey high climbing maze and didn't reappear for nearly half-an-hour (a few more grey hairs on my head), and the girls spent hours experimenting with gears and tunnels and slopes and gravity. They finished the day in a cage pretending to be construction workers and I took advantage of a few moments of calm to catch my breath before they found their way out again... Onwards.