Boston Children's Museum

Let me just state, for the record, that when you are three and two thirds years old, the Boston Children’s Museum is pretty well about the greatest place on earth.

Oliver and I spent two hours there yesterday. When we got up today, I couldn’t think of anything else that would be as much fun as going back. So Oliver, my mother, and I went back for another three hours today.

Three floors of 100% kid-focused fund. Highlights: dressing up as a bee in the “PlaySpace.” The Arthur exhibit. Playing with boats in the model of the Fort Point Channel. Wearing dresses and poodle skirts in Grandmother’s Attic. Learning to use a wheelchair, and how to pick up balls with a head-mounted scoop in the accessAbility exhibit. And the turtles.

Otherwise in Boston, we found two great playgrounds: there’s one in the North End in the park opposite the Marriott Long Wharf, and another in Boston Common at the end of the Frog Pond. Both are modern, well-maintained, and lots of fun. And both use a spongy mixture of ground-up rubber tires and some magical bouncy material under all the equipment — a material we also saw used in Bilbao — that is so much better than the sand, gravel or cedar chips we use in PEI that we might just as well be using shards of broken glass.

We’re heading north tomorrow. Johnny and Jodi are speeding ahead as an advance party. By Thursday there will be at least nine next of our kin on the Island.