My Awesome Pre-Birthday Birthday

My birthday is not until next week, but Nathan already gave me my gift(s). He did great!

First, we drove about an hour out of town and dropped Noah off at some friends' house. He spent the night with Dave and Bonnie, and they did a great job--Noah had a grand old time. And Mom and Dad got to have a Noah-free night!

Then, Nathan took me to an inn about five minutes from their house, and it turned out to be the oldest inn in America. How cool is that?! It's called Longfellow's Wayside Inn, because the poet wrote a collection of poems based on the people he met there called Tales of a Wayside Inn. That collection includes "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," for example.


It was such a neat place to stay! As soon as you walked in, you knew the place was centuries old because it had that smell--like old wood and varnish or something. It also had several rooms set up and furnished as they would have been in different periods of time, such as colonial times, the 1800's when Longfellow would have stayed there, etc.

Here's a picture of our room. It was full of antiques and had a crocheted lace canopy over the bed. It was very nice.


Now, this inn, being so old, doesn't have many rooms. This sign on the back of the door cracked me up. You know how on the emergency exit maps, there are usually dozens of little boxes and a turn or two? Well, check this one out:
Um, it doesn't get much simpler than that! Ha! It cracked me up.

We also had dinner at the inn, which was very nice. We ate in the old kitchen, which has a giant fireplace and was definitely old and colonial-looking. If you ever have the opportunity to go, I would definitely recommend the crock of French onion soup.

And before dinner, Nathan gave me my big gift. So, yeah, he kinda sorta bought me some pearls. EEE! I love them. They are beautiful and perfect. He chose some with a slightly rosy luster, which the jeweler told him was good for people with porcelain complexions. They are beautiful. He said he figured I should have a nice gift for my 30th birthday. I told him he needs to start thinking now of what he would like when he turns 30. :)

We had our picture taken outside the dining room after dinner.
Aren't my pearls pretty? My husband ain't bad, either. And also, I think I look just a little bit pregnant in this picture. ;)

The next morning, we had breakfast at the inn, and it was fantastic. I had the gristmill pancakes. They use the grain that is ground at the gristmill on the property. I highly recommend the pancakes. Here is the gristmill (we visited it after we picked Noah up that morning):

Nathan and Noah climbed on top of a rock behind the gristmill.

And then we headed off to enjoy the rest of our trip, which was a jaunt to Brimfield, the home of one of the biggest antique shows in the country. I read about it in a magazine about a year ago, and I told Nathan that I'd love to go there for my birthday to buy an antique that we can always say we got when we lived in Boston.

Brimfield was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed walking up and down the aisles and looking at all the random stuff. Noah was great, too. We bought him a little train and a bus, and he was happy running them up and down his legs as he sat in the stroller. I was nervous about how he would be, after the fiasco at the last festival we went to. However, we couldn't have asked him to behave any better.

In fact, he charmed quite a lot of other people, too. We bought some lunch and settled down to eat in a quiet spot between two vendors, and the lady running one came out and chatted with us for a while. She took a bit of a shine to Noah, and in the end, she ended up giving us two tubs of frozen lemonade mix. Ha!
She was very nice, and she also gave us a little cup of frozen lemonade for Noah, which was really tasty. She also mentioned that they send lemonade overseas to the troops. So if you ever have the opportunity to buy some Del's lemonade, go for it. They seem to be nice people.

In the end, although all the browsing was fun, no antiques really called my name. Ironically, we didn't buy any antiques at the antiques show, but we did buy some art.

Back at the Sheepshearing Festival, we saw a booth for an artist who painted some stuff that we really loved. It's considered quasi-primitive folk art, which does not sound like Lauren at all, but we were just really drawn to it. She portrays small New England towns, basically stretching from the North Shore down to the Cape and Islands. At the Brimfield show, we ran across another of her booths and were again kind of entranced by her pieces, so we ended up buying some stuff.

We bought two small prints and one medium-sized limited print. The actual paintings are way out of our price range, even though they are so cool. We really like how there are lots of things to look at--they just hold your interest for a while.

The two small ones are of a winter and a fall scene, both of which are the seasons we will miss when we move away:


And the larger one is of a scene on Nantucket. Notice the "Starbucks" near the front. Nathan asked if this was a joke, and the guy at the stand told us that, no, actually, the Starbuck family were whalers who started out on Nantucket, and some of the children moved out west. Who knew?

Anyway, we had a great time. Nathan really could not have planned a more perfect birthday surprise for me. It was very Lauren, and I loved all of it! Thank you, Nathan!