New York City

For Memorial Day weekend, we drove to New York City for a few days to take in the sights. We stayed near Columbus Circle on the edge of Central Park. Thursday night after arrival, we ate some Thai food near our hotel. It was good, as we haven't had good Thai food in a long time.

We had a list of things to see and a possible order to see them in. Friday we started off at the Statue of Liberty. We arrived early (in line around 10) so the wait wasn't too long at all (maybe 20 minutes). The weather was nice and we enjoyed the view a bit. We didn't have tickets to get in as they were sold out a week in advance (crown tickets book 6 months out). We decided to skip Ellis Island as we didn't have a strong desire to go and we had lots of other things we wanted to do. Once we got off the boat, the security line was stretched around most of Battery Park. We started walking north and took a few pictures at the Charging Bull. Our next stop was the 9/11 Memorial and Reflecting Pools. We talked to Nolan a bit about what happened there. Next we went to Lombardi's for pizza. This is supposed to be an iconic New York pie. Honestly, I was not thrilled. It is heavy sauce, light cheese, and expensive. The crust is very good, though. Then Kacey went to Purl Soho while I let the kids play at a park for a little bit. Lastly, we went to the American Museum of Natural History for the last hour it was open. We walked back south through Central Park and ended up eating at The Greek Kitchen. Food was quite good!

Saturday, Kacey wasn't feeling super well so I took Nolan and Liana to Intrepid Museum. We got there as they opened, but as it was Fleet Week, the line was long to get in. Luckily it moved, but still took a while. We first went to see the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Nolan liked this and we checked out a lot of tools and other artifacts. The deck of the ship was covered in aircraft and the kids each picked out some favorites for pictures. We then climbed up to the officers control decks to look around a bit. Next we headed to the hangar deck to check out some kids activities. There was also a 1/40 scale of the Intrepid built in Lego. After playing a bit, we started to wrap up our visit and went out to look at the submarine and the Concorde. On our way to bus to Top of the Rock, we stopped for a snack of some fries. We then met Kacey and Colin at Top of the Rock. We decided to go up this rather than Empire State due to hearing it is just better all around (experience, view). It was pretty easy (stroller accessible) and a pretty good view. After this we went to Times Square to walk around and eat ice cream. Well, we didn't really do either as Times Square was packed (probably as usual) to the point it was hard to get around, and we couldn't really find any ice cream until we had almost given up. We ended up walking all the way back to Rockefeller and went to the Lego store and plotted out dinner. We found a place that looked good, but the wait was too long, so we ended up at Rosie O'Grady's. This was my first Guinness since Ireland and while it is true that they aren't as good here, our Irish waitress made it a pleasant, memorable evening. On our walk home, with a stop at Grom along the way, we happened to walk next to the Ed Sullivan Theater, home of the Late Show with David Letterman.

The next day we took our time getting up and our first stop was Eataly. While I had high expectations of this place, the things I was looking for were not really there. We did eat pizza and pasta here, and they were pretty good. We took a look at the famous Flat Iron building, which is next door, then started a walk north. Our plan was to walk past and look in the Empire State Building, the Library, Grand Central Station, and the Chrysler building. After we wrapped up the walk (and got some Junior's Cheesecake), we went back to the American Natural History Museum to see some things we didn't get to during our prior visit. Nolan had a lot of fun looking at the ocean animals exhibit. We picked Toloache for dinner, a modern Mexican place. The food was pretty tasty and the staff was nice to us. We decided to stop by a donut ice cream, Holey Cream, sandwich place on the way to the hotel. They source pretty good ice cream, and we were glad to have not tried the donut ice cream sandwich; we saw one and they looked intimidating!

The next day we visited the Bronx Zoo on our way home. This was a pretty good zoo and the kids had fun.

Pictures from our trip can be found here.

Colin is Five Months Old!

Colin turned five moths on Tuesday. He has been barrel rolling and scooting around for a week or so (also getting up on his knees), but Monday night he really crawled. Now, by the end of the week, he is getting much faster! He went to the doc today and he is 25" and 13lb 8oz. He is small, but also very active and not eating much during the days. He has been sleeping in his crib some during the day, but he doesn't sleep very long as he is probably hungry. He ends up sleeping on me quite a lot. Hopefully when I can start some solid food, he will start sleeping more (like how things went with Liana).