Maura Turns Eight

Last week saw the arrival of Maura’s eighth birthday, celebrated in the Ellett household with a three day festival, occasioned both by her birthday and by the presence of my parents, whose visits are always an occasion for celebration.

Friday was her actual birthday and the celebrations began with dinner at Kelly’s Landing, Maura’s choice. She had a lobster. Maura loves to eat anything that once lived in the sea. I had almost as much fun watching her eat it as she had consuming it. After dinner we moved on for desert. We went to Michelle's, for ice cream. A local favorite, Michelle's offers dozens of flavors of soft serve mixed to order and almost as many flavors of hard ice cream. Later we went to an arcade to play games for a while. Maura, her grandfather and I played games and won tickets for Maura while her mother and grandmother did some shopping. We all had a good time and we won enough tickets for Maura to bring home a set of Japanese erasers, probably the best prize she’s ever won at the arcade, though it certainly cost a tiny fraction of what I spent on tokens. That mattered not at all. The fun we had was worth the money spent and would have been even if Maura had brought back no prize at all. I for one would happily have spent my small share of tokens on pinball and air hockey and Maura is a big fan of race games.

The festival continued the next day, Saturday, with a trip into Boston. We started in Chinatown for dim sum at a restaurant Jennifer had been to before and Maura wanted to try. Everyone enjoyed the meal. We all ate way too much. It was a good thing we took a walk afterwards, along the Greenway, through Quincy Market where we took in a street performance and on to City Hall Plaza where we spent some time at the Green Fair. When Maura had had her fill of bouncy houses we moved on to the Science Museum, one of our favorite destinations in Boston.

The highlight of our visit to the Science Museum was our visit to the butterfly garden, which we had not been to before. It was worth the extra charge to see it. The butterflies were beautiful and peaceful. I could have spent hours there, particularly watching the iridescent blue Common Morpho that took up residence on my dad’s hat and seemed content to stay there all day. In the end we had to gently shoo it off when it was time to leave.

Sunday was final day of the festival, the day we shared with more family and friends. Maura’s Aunt Andrea and Uncle Kevin brought her cousins. The Tittlers came by. So did our friend Joe and Maura’s friend Dominic from across the street. We had pizza from Denly Gardens, always a treat, and later cake and ice cream. It was raining so we stayed inside but everyone had a good time anyway. Maura got to show off her birthday gifts and the kids watched Fantasia for a while, which kept them almost quiet, a sure sign that it held their interest.

Lowell National Historical Park

On Sunday Maura, Jennifer and I visited the Lowell National Historical Park, in Lowell, Massachusetts. We hadn’t been planning the trip but Lowell came up in conversation on Sunday morning and we decided to go that afternoon as soon as I was done with church. We loaded up the car and drove to Lowell, arriving around 1:30. At the Visitors’ Center we registered for a free trolley tour and picked up a Junior Ranger book for Maura. Because our tour started in an hour we explored the exhibits in the Visitors’ Center, starting with the multi-media program “An Industrial Revelation”, which was a good orientation for what we would see later in the day. After watching the program Maura worked on her Junior Ranger activities until it was time for the tour to start.


On the trolley tour we rode a restored antique trolley on old railroad tracks through Lowell. Along the way we learned about the trolleys that transported the mill workers around the city and the canals that brought water from the Merrimack River to power the mills. As part of the tour we got to see the River Transformed Exhibit at the Wannalancit Mills. The exhibit, which is rarely open to the public except for guided tours, showed the workings of the mill including the turbine that extracted power from the water flowing in the canal and the gears and flywheel system that transferred that power to the looms and other mill machinery.

From the Wannalancit Mills we rode the trolley to the Boott Cotton Mills where we left the trolley tour to spend some time at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. There we learned more about textile manufacturing and the history of Lowell. Upstairs at the museum were some well put together but fairly standard exhibits on the history of the city and the manufacture of textiles but the most interesting exhibit in the museum was the working weaving room downstairs. The constant noise of the machinery in the large room closely packed with looms gave a real idea of what it would have been like to work there when the mill was still operating and working looms gave an idea of what was really produced there and how it was done. Only a half dozen or so looms were actually producing cloth under the eye of one worker in period costume but it was enough to conjure in my imagination the busy scene where dozens of workers tended hundreds of looms.

Our visit to the Boott Mills allowed Maura to complete her Junior Ranger requirements and since the Visitors’ Center would be closing soon we headed back, making a brief stop at the Mill Girls and Immigrants exhibit at the Mogan Cultural Center next to Boarding House Park. There we learned just a bit about the Mill Girls lives working in early Lowell. We didn’t have enough time to fully experience that museum and that is one of the reasons why we agreed that Lowell is worth a return trip. There is quite a bit that we didn’t see.

At the Visitors’ Center Maura collected her Junior Ranger badge. Then we made a pit stop at Brew’d Awakenings, a few blocks away, for a pick me up before heading back to Weymouth. We’d all enjoyed ourselves and leaned a lot about the history of Lowell and of industry in America.