Thirty-Two Months of Toddler Frances (and Hyannis, MA)

I know Frances and I had just come home from Maine, but we needed a little vacation for the three of us.  Plus, sleeping in air-conditioning sounded really good.  I thought Hyannis, Massachusetts, sounded nice (Hyannis = Kennedys = beautiful homes to ogle, right?) and it had cheap hotel rooms, so we headed off.  On the way, we stopped in Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts.  It was lovely, highly recommend it to any locals.

We started in their car collection, housed in a reproduction of the round barn at the Hancock Shaker Village, which is also near and dear to our hearts.  Frances was impressively interested in the old cars, but her favorite was this car she was allowed to touch.

This could easily be my favorite water feature ever - just a very simple water trough that spilled out into a lily pond.  Frances liked all the larvae in the pond.  To each her own.

Eat your heart out, John Singer Sargent...O.k., maybe not, but close.

We were momentarily lost on the garden's trails, but it was not a bad place to be lost.  

There was also a Norman Rockwell collection (which we skipped, I'll admit) and a carousel (which we rode many, many times, but it's hard to get a good picture on a carousel).

We finished up in the children's area, which was almost worth the trip all by itself.  It included xylophones, drums, a tree house, crafts, plants to water, and more.  It was well worth braving the light drizzle coming down.

A final shot of Frances in the gardens.

Then we traveled on to Hyannis, but it turned out to be, well, a tourist-trap, to put it nicely.  Apparently, the Kennedys hung out in Hyannisport, but we wore ourselves out looking for nice parts of Hyannis and never made it to Hyannisport.  It was still a very needed get-away.  We all loved the gardens, Frances loved the hotel pool and Mark and I loved sleeping in air-conditioning.  We did stop on the way home and buy a window unit.

The pictures above were taken on Frances's Thirty-Two Months Birthday, so I'll do my little run down.

• Favorite reads: Still Curious George, but I found some more modern re-incarnations of George at the library and they're preferable to the originals.  Much shorter, but I'm still waiting for the man with the yellow hat to realize George is not going to be a good little monkey and stay out of trouble.
• Firsts: School, of course!  She goes all day for four days a week, which is a lot of time, but I think we are happier together when we are together.  I hope she's learning to branch out and I'm getting to do some volunteer work.
• Frequent phrase: Still "Why?" but I've come to realize she asks all sorts of questions all the time.  She'll even ask "What's Frances doing?"  I wish I could count the number of questions she asks a day.  I bet we've had days of up to 100 questions.  Sometimes I don't even notice it, but other times I get very worn out.  A typical conversation sounds like this:
• Frances: What's that?
• Me: A red car.
• Frances: Why?
• Me: (deep sigh) Because it's a car and because it's red.
• Frances: What is Frances doing?
• Me: Putting on Band-Aids.
• Frances: Why?
• Me: (deep sigh) I dunno, kiddo.  Is it fun?
• Frances: Yeah.  What's that noise? etc.

         I try to keep the sighs in check, but sometimes it's hard.

• Names:  Frances has figured out that her name is Frances Upton and that mine isn't.  This is a little bothersome to her because she wants to be alike in as many ways possible.  For example, it gives her great pleasure when we all wear stripes or flowers, although she hasn't caught daddy wearing flowers yet and probably never will.  And she thinks it's great fun to tell me that my name is Frances.  A few times, she's told me my name is Morgan Upton, but she doesn't seem too traumatized that it isn't.  If she ends up emotionally scarred by the difference in our last names, all those folks who asked Mark why I didn't change my name can feel justified.  I'm not holding my breath.