One of the local events that is a huge draw in Boston is First Night, an elaborate New Year’s Eve celebration of the culture and community of the city. While many other cities and towns across the nation now hold First Night festivities, Boston is the original and standard bearer. It is really quite grand and kicks off well before midnight, starting around 9AM and carrying through to midnight fireworks.

One of the cooler features are the marvelous ice sculptures, no pun intended. They are enormous and beautifully ornate. Since heading downtown with 2 million other people really isn’t in the cards for us. So while I was busy completing some work, Keri and Ali packed up the kids and headed east to see if they could catch a glimpse of the sculptures the day before the official unveiling.

The trip on the train was apparently quite fascinating for our little man, as revelaed by the intense studying visible in this photograph.

Unfortunately, the trip proved to be less than fulfilling on the ice sculpture front. Since the weather has started to warm a bit, it would seem that preservation is of major importance. Also there was some work still to be done. Consequently, most of what they got to see was this.

Ali sardonically referred to this part of the trip as “Gumdrop.” This is a kind of kidsafe code for an excrement expletive, as well as being a reference to one of our infamous exploits to exotic local sights. Sadly in the transitioning this site to a new platform, the images from the original post have been lost. I’ll have to look into digging some of those photos out again.

Nevertheless, they all managed to still have some fun. Hadley got to walk around the city and covered a whole lot of ground. It proved to be quite a journey for both of the kiddos. They were pretty wiped out from it all.