Take Me Out To The Ball Game!

Last week, as you may remember, we were dealing with a broken dryer. Dave discovered that he could easily repair it and put a call into our favorite, local appliance store. Hudson Appliance ordered the part for us, and the girls and I picked it up after Emma's dance class last week. While we were there they also gave us two word searches for the girls to complete for a contest they were running. The chosen word search child would receive four tickets to Sunday's Red Sox game. The girls completed the word searches (and it was no easy task as that was one of the hardest word searches I've ever seen) and as luck would have it Grace's word search was chosen! We were over the moon (and still are)! Dave and I bought the girls their first Red Sox hats in honor of this very special occasion!

Yesterday started out grey and cloudy with rain predicted for the afternoon. We dressed accordingly, packed our rain gear and headed off to church. The girls first week of cherub choir was yesterday and we knew that they didn't want to miss it. On our way to church Emma was singing a song to the clouds "please clouds move away we want to see the Red Sox.....". Evidently her song worked as the sky cleared while we were in church and became more and more gorgeous as the day went on (as you can see from the picture above)!

No trip to Fenway is complete without a Fenway Frank. Even I, who am not a big fan of hot dogs, always has one when we are there. Later on we also made sure that we each had ice cream in a little Red Sox hat, too. There's just something about eating ice cream out of those little baseball helmets that's just so fun!

Retired numbers. 

Watching the game. 

I was on the lookout for my friend Averil while we were there. She volunteers with the Red Sox Foundation and had shared on Facebook that she'd be there that day so I knew we had to find her before we left. I was thrilled to see her in our section and even more thrilled that she took a couple of family pictures for us! This one is a wee bit sunny but I just love it (Plus, I'm saving the better one to share on Friday)! Thanks Averil for taking some pictures for us! I'm so glad we got to visit for a bit too! It made an already very special day that much more amazing!

Once we'd had our fill of hot dogs, ice cream in little hats, and had sung "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "Sweet Caroline" we figured we should get going. The Red Sox were winning (with ease) and we wanted to beat the crowds. We stopped to take a few more pictures. It was then that a sweet woman offered take one of all four of us (thus making it three family pictures in one day)! After all they don't call it "Friendly Fenway" for nothing! 

It was in that amount of time that the game ended and we found ourselves dealing with the massive crowd we were trying to avoid. We decided not to rush and instead took our time leaving Fenway. 

Once we had left the park we headed toward the T. With the crowds still massive and how gorgeous the day was we decided to keep walking. It was lovely to be in the city. I always find myself wishing that David and I had lived in Boston as newlyweds. It's such an amazing city and one of the few that I feel comfortable in. I actually think that I could have even been OK with living in Boston as a mama. I'm not a big city girl but for some reason Boston has never felt like the big city to me (now, New York on the other hand is a totally different story. That is indeed the big city and whenever I've been there I always feel like a fish out of water). We walked much longer and much farther than we had planned and before we knew it we found ourselves passing by the scene of the bombings. It was very surreal. We walked farther on and ended up coming upon this wall of peace flags. It was extremely moving and had me very choked up. 

We wandered through the Public Garden and Boston Common and finally made it to a T stop that wasn't crowded. It was a glorious day full of wonderful memories and was all thanks to our dryer breaking. Thanks Hudson Appliance for choosing Grace's word search! We had a truly fabulous time at the game and it was a day that we will never forget!