Meigs Point Nature Center

Meigs Point Nature Center

Hammonasset State Park in Madison, CT is Connecticut's largest public beach park and less than 15minutes fro where we are staying.  Growing up in this area, my husband remembers coming here when he was younger for going to the beach and riding his bike on the many trails available.  Saltwater swimming and fishing along the coast is complimented with camping, boardwalks, walking and biking trails, and even a nature center which is free for patrons of the state park.  Luckily for us, everything was free in the winter months, and donations are welcome.

Live reptile cages

There are three rooms on the first floor with live turtles, lizards, snakes, frogs, and more - we were like kids in a candy store!! There were also many taxidermined animals on display to see like a black bear, bobcat, white tailed deer, beavers, and many local animals as well.  Down the stairs was set up for kids to explore local ocean wildlife with multiple fish tanks, a touch activity table and a large touch tank.  One of the lobsters was super friendly and even reached up to touch your hand if you put it close to him!  The other lobster was a little shy and the crabs seemed to skitter around, but the fish schooled over and the friendly lobster created lots of giggles for all of us!  Back upstairs, it was feeding time for all the turtles and since we were surprisingly the only people visiting for the morning, our little Keiki got to help feed the hungry tortoises.  What a fun treat!  I highly recommend visiting!!

Meeting a bearded dragon

Ooo, the excitement!

Shaking hands with a very friendly lobster

Winter Snow Storm

This weekend was a blizzard that hit the U.S. east coast pretty badly. It brought in 2 feet of snow in states south of here but luckily New England states were spared.  After last year's blizzard of 2015 where we had over 3 feet of snow in January we were happily reminded why we sold our MA home and are thanking our lucky stars that now without a snow blower, we were spared as renters who still have to shovel our own snow.  The one thing we are not used to  being close to the ocean in this rental home is that the snow storm brought harbor swells in with possible flooding across the street (left picture above) and by Sunday, the water receded quickly as the storm was cleared up (right pic above).  If we ever bough a home by the ocean, we learned a quick lesson on the importance of needing sand dunes!

Cleaning snow off our cars for the first time in 6 long winters...
We were nicely spoiled with two car garage in our first home in MA

Weekly Activities

Smile!

Only one day this week has been above freezing temperatures so we took a walk down the street to the path to the beach.  The reeds are great for protecting us from the ice cold wind once we got down to the snowy path.  There is supposed to be a snowstorm this coming weekend so it was nice to scope out the sand and shells before covered in a blanket of white.  Feeling like kids in a candy store, every trip is like a new scavenger hunt for both of us!

And speaking of candy stores, what an amazing display of candy jars at Fresh Market!  There is a new specialty store in Guilford, CT that just opened up that sells all natural and organic foods. It also has isles of trail mixes and candies, a bakery filled with fresh pastries, and even their seafood counter is amazing!  It's hard to not want to buy every last goodie in the whole place!  

The local Clinton, CT library is a sense of humor when checking out books - priceless!  Spanish class for toddlers is offered on Tuesday mornings which was cute for different language exposure while singing known nursery rhymes.  Being a much smaller town then we are used to in Massachusetts, there is usually very few other children at this library which actually nice because then our little Keiki isn't overwhelmed by child-chaos and more encouraged to make new friends during story hour. But I am surprised that there aren't more parents getting their munchkins out of the house in this frigid weather and utilizing all the warm and cozy library's in the area have to offer.  Maybe there just isn't that many children?  Maybe there are other fun things to do in the area that we need to investigate?  Either way I'm still a big advocate that parents should utilize their local libraries for enriching and entertaining children, especially in the winter time so we can all get out of the house and rid our littles ones of all their pent-up balls of energy!

Playing with the puppet theatre and grocery market

And lastly, all this crisp air leading up to this forecasted snowstorm is lending to crystal clear skies over the ocean.  After incredible sunsets filled with rainbows of colors, we are lucky to see deep navy blue skies littered with a blanket of stars!

Town Beach Sunset

Town Beach

At the end of our street is the start of a short beach path walk.  It starts through the reeds and walks along the tide, leading you to the town beach. It's barely long enough for a 10 minute stroll, but you could take a lot longer to enjoy the small waves that wash broken seashells and debris ashore.  Having kept more shells then I ever know what to do with from Sanibel, Island, FL I choose to just enjoy what I found along this walk and leave the beauty for someone else to gather.  I found shell remnants of welks, moon snails, and horseshoe crabs.  

Walking alone the ocean is always the most peaceful way to clear your head when so many life decisions need to be made.  And who says any planning even needs to be done right now?  Not when I'm enjoying the warmer 40*F weather and a nice quiet walk on the beach with my faithful dog companion. Doodles had a field day sniffing out all the seaside treasures.

At the end of our walk we met up with my husband, who had brought our daughter Keiki to the town playground at the beach.  It was built just right for tiny tots like her!  Not only is the surface under the play elements squishy rubber, but if a munchkin trips and falls while running around, there is beauty sand to catch you.  We only stayed about 20 minutes because the wind was icy off the ocean.

And speaking about the"ocean," I'm beginning to wonder what to call this water because when looking at a Google map, it isn't clearly labeled.  It's definitely salt water, and moves drastically in-and-out with the tide.  I want to assume it's the town of Clinton Harbor?  But since we are in Connecticut, there is not what I would consider open ocean since the coast is along Long Island Sound.  But are we close enough to Block Island Sound instead?  I'm not sure so I wonder if I can find any local town maps while out on our adventures one day.

Wintertime Activities

Outdoor activities are limited at our CT beach house because the weather has been bitterly cold.  We were quick to forget just how windy it can be, blowing the frigid cold right off the winter water.  It surprisingly hasn't stopped us from going outdoors to play, it's just that more planning is involved for shorter trips (under 20-30 minutes outside) and require us to be incredibly bundled up. And luckily since the cold hasn't scared us away, we have had some great opportunities to find outdoor playgrounds on the beach, a walk down the road to the community private beach and jetty, playing ball with our dog, and even finding a town recreation center with walking trails.

Wintertime can make our indoor homes a very solitary confinement space for most stay-at-home parents.  If you are like us, there is only so much coloring, cooking and crafting activities that can be tolerated until everyone in the house is screaming, "I'm bored!" and as parents we sigh because we just can't stomach another trip to the mall.  Truth is that even if your family isn't the outdoorsy-type like our family is, we all like to get beyond our four walls before it feels like it's white and padded. So even though it's been only a week here at our rental house, we're already gearing up to stretch beyond these walls.

We've enjoyed scoping out the town for places to bring our daughter Keiki and so far we have found the library, an incredible bakery, a pet store (which I like to call the "free zoo"), a community church, and a toy store.  We've even taken note of an indoor kids play-place that we'd like to try one day.  There are always opportunities to turn everyday places into fun adventures, it's all just a matter of how you look at each opportunity.

Blessings of a New Baby

We're so excited to announce our family is growing this summer!  I've been at the edge of my seat while waiting to share our news of our second child, who is due early July.  It's amazing how fast my first trimester has gone, especially with selling our home, Christmas, and New Year's holidays.  Moving isn't the easiest when pregnant, but it's even harder when you are trying to keep it private for the first 12 weeks.  I am incredibly grateful for my loving and supportive husband during these new life adventures we are on  lately.  Not to mention how he had to hold down the fort most of the time I was having morning sickness!  He had to do all the heavy lifting while packing up our house to sell, and continues to lug all our stuff (that we kept out of storage) in and out of our cars as we visited four different friends and family houses during holiday visits, and then again when checking into our first rental home.  Eek, that's a lot of heavy lifting!!

Our family is pretty dedicated to traveling or finding everyday adventures, but we didn't quite know just how much we could handle all at once until this past autumn/winter.  Coming home from our 6 week toad trip to Florida in October we were serious about selling our house by putting it on the market in less then one week but never expected to sell it so fast at the open house.  And we were hoping to expand our family, but didn't expect to be blessed and have our prayers answered so quickly.  But then again, it's who we are: a family that lives for adventures and we are certainly on a crazy journey together - so exciting!!

Move to Connecticut Beach House

Exciting week! This week we moved into our first new house since selling our home almost 3 weeks ago. We have decided to spend our first month in western Connecticut in a beach house. We choose the location for two main reasons: it's a close driving distance to some of my husbands' family and because vacation beach houses are cheap to rent in winter time.  I mean super cheap.  Like we opted for a larger, more spacious house to rent just because it was surprisingly an option.  It would never be affordable in summer to spend a single vacation week at a place like this let alone a month, but once the bitter cold whips in to New England, it's houses like this one that are great for families in transition like us to scoop up and call "home" for a short while.

This house is part of a harbor community so it must feel like a lively summer family-fun place in warmer weather.  Lucky for us, most of the houses aren't rented out or owner occupied so it's perfectly private for our needs.  The inviting living area overlooks a lovely view of the ocean inlet and the community ocean beach is just steps away at the end of our quiet street.  We feel so lucky to find such an inviting house!   And we can't wait to really explore the town, it's definitely a nice coastal area.

The house has three floors, and unconventionally set-up for optimizing the ocean views.  The bedrooms are on the first floor and the living rooms are on the second (kitchen, living, dining, den) and third (family room).   Each level has a balcony that must be amazing when the temperature is warmer to open the sliding glass doors to let the ocean air in.

The first floor has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  We let our toddler pick which room she'd like to set-up camp and she picked the one with fun dog and ant decorations.  And her bathroom has a huge whirlpool tub so hoping to make bath time fun for her... she's been boycotting bath time lately like most toddlers go through so anything different or fun would hopefully help at this point. Plus who wouldn't like to chat with Kermit the Frog while brushing their teeth during bedtime routine? Fun!

Three large sliding doors overlook the ocean inlet

Kitchen

The house is decorated in a whimsical/artistic/eclectic flare and mixed with lots of Ikea furniture and accessories everywhere.  I'm grateful for all the Ikea stuff because it's pretty indestructible for toddler and dog-proofing!  Overall, the house is pretty bold with it's interior design (if you can call it that) paint choices of clashing oranges and yellows with the occasional neon green, but somehow it all ties together in a fun and entertaining way.  But I have to say the one artistic flare I could do without is the statue painting overlooking the Dining room table - not what I would call an "appetizing" choice for looking at while eating family meals...  but Keiki seems to think it's a man who is shot-putting so it's good comic relief.  Our bedroom is cartoon jungle themed and the bedroom our two-year old chose was the red room with the separate beds, ants on the bedspreads, and dogs on the walls.  Overall a fun bedtime experience, which will come in handy as she is transitioning away from her crib and moving to a big-girl-bed soon.

We originally thought to set up most of the kid toys up here in the third floor family room because it's a big open space to spread out.  But that ended up being hard to watch her while cooking in the kitchen so even though we've only been her 2 days so far, we have rearranged the living room to make open space on the second floor and kept the third floor clutter-free for my husband and I to retreat to do work during nap time or watch TV or play dominoes after bedtime.  To create a sense of normalcy we also went shopping crazy the first day we were here so we could stock up on meat from BJ's, paper products from Walmart, and food from Stop n' Shop.  We have rented enough houses for "vacations" at this point that hopefully we have packing/unpacking down to a science for quickly feeling like the new house is more like a home, and then the best way to jump into actually living in the house is to go grocery shopping.  Most houses don't come equipped with spices, trash bags, toilet tissue, laundry detergent, etc., so the sooner those are bought (or we pre-think to bring them), the better.  To our surprise, this house had an entire cabinet of spices, aluminum foil and coffee filters to start us off.  And most houses we've rented have the minimal kitchen appliances available, but this place is spoiling us with ample cookware, cups and plates, toaster oven and toaster and more that just makes this place an even more welcoming home feel.  We feel very lucky and blessed to get this journey started off on the right foot!

Visits to See Family and a Happy New Year

"Santa, are you in here?"

Happy New Year to all!!  We have been spending these Christmas holiday week with our families since our big move from selling our New England home.  These past two weeks have basically been a whirl-wind of bouncing around from house to house, packing and unpacking, and late nights catching up and talking about life with family and friends.  Crazy to think that this is the first quiet time I have gotten since we've sold our house! How have your holidays been?  I hope they were filled with food and good company like ours was!

Mystic, CT Seaport

Our first out-of-state travels started near Mystic, CT.  It was fun attending the luminary lights in the evening in the coastal town.  The most entertaining for our little Keiki was hearing "Christmas carols" performed by a group of pirates.  They were dressed in amazing wool costumes, right out of The Pirates of the Caribbean and their songs were altered for a pirate theme. Toy store, window shopping, watching the water under the bridge, and seeing all the ship masts lit-up with Christmas lights were also super fun.

There are two casinos in the western part of the state of Connecticut, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.  We are not fans of the gambling/smoking parts that casinos have to offer, but anyone who has been to them knows that it's only a small part of what's available.  Foxwoods is huge, I mean HUGE!  It now includes a Tanger Outlet mall so it's fun to visit because it's almost circular so you can just walk around, and around, and around as you shop, or in our case: check out the Christmas decorations.  We also visited Mohegan Sun because there is a life-sized gingerbread house that you can walk into.  No joke!  It's all made of baked cookies made to look like bricks and icing, and the life-sized cookie Nutcrackers pretty much as tall as me!  Over the past few years, it's become a tradition to take pictures with the gingerbread house each year for Christmas time.

George Washington Bridge
NYC in fog

Traveling to New Jersey to see my parents was our next state we visited.  They actually live pretty close to Pennsylvania so most of the activities we did were there.  One of the biggest things we have noticed is different in the states that any of our parents live in scattered over the east coast, is the amount of space and breathing room there is when compared to our "old home" state of Massachusetts.  When driving around, most roads pass lots of farm or open land and traffic is nowhere near as bad as what you would find in MA.  And people talk slower and greet each other at gas stations and grocery stores with that hometown feel.  We are starting to realize just how urban our "suburban" area was.  Even though we have only traveled less than 300miles south total, it really is eye opening the lack of 'Competing-with-the-Joneses' and almost slower pace then in the Boston area.    Not to mention how much slower paced it becomes if we travel even further south to see other family.    But I could write an entire other post on this subject so I'll save it for another time.

Playhouse on the Delaware River

Stranger things have
happened in New Hope

In PA, we went to the Bucks County Children's Museum and our two-year old loved it!  I haven't been back to New Hope, PA in probably 16 years and although the artistic town has grown tremendously, it still has a few of the eccentric shops that I grew-up loving.  The town also has an old locomotive train that runs public train rides every hour which was fun to watch too.

The Children's Museum has a flat-rate of $8 per person (children and seniors included) and is an interactive and educational environment for children.  I would say the best age range for the museum was definitely from tiny tots who can walk up to school age.  It was perfect for Keiki to explore the different stations and interact with the other children, who I was impressed they all played very nicely together.  The hands-on learning experiences included weather, archeological digs, light and sound, and exploration play for areas build like a hospital, post office, or train station.  It was a blast!!

Back in NJ we visited Northlandz one morning which boasts the world's largest model railroad and I now think I believe them!  It could easily take you 3-4 hours to walk through and take it all in.  There was up to 100 trains traveling more then 8 miles of track and 40ft bridges spanning huge canyons all inside a twisting and winding trip through what I suspect was an old theatre.  And not only was there trains, but over 200 doll collection and art, antiques, and organs - that the ticket collector played as a concert for folks visiting.  And as if that wasn't enough, there was a small train ride that you could go on outside too.  I'm not a train enthusiast by any means but this place was memorizing even for adults. But my favorite part was that throughout the place, there was a step-up and handle to hold for our two-year-old to see on her own so I didn't have to lift her up the whole time. She doesn't like strollers, but I would still recommend it for others who visit because you go through so much only to come to a sign that reads, "You are now 25% through the museum" and you are shocked thinking you will need to pick up the pace if you'll ever get your toddler through the whole place.  Yes, it's that huge!

So overall it was a very entertaining and relaxing time spent with immediate family these past two weeks but now we are off again to our first rental house for January of 2016.  It is a beach house on the central Connecticut coast!  First up is collecting all our forwarded mail so we can open our Christmas cards from friends and family and hang them in our new place so it feels more like home.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!