front porch ladies

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Spring break in NYC!!

We've been wanting to take a trip to New York City (especially Ella!) and Chris was feeling up to it physically so we booked it for Ella's spring break! It went so well! We went into it with a list of things we hoped to do and a very loose timeline to do them. Our mindset was that we were going to go with the flow and not be burdened by a schedule. If the kids were tired we'd head back to the hotel and if we didn't get to every place on our list, no big deal. This type of flexibility doesn't gone naturally to me but preparing to do the trip with this mindset worked great and it was a very low stress, very fun family bonding time! Definitely will do this again!

The Ferris Wheel in the Times Square Toys R Us was a big hit with Sadie. She went twice! Ella on the other hand was not digging the height and refused to go!

Our hotel was the TRYP in south Times Square and was a good fit for us!

Times Square baby!

We happened upon the Macy's Annual Flower show and it was awesome!

These steps in Uniqlo changed color and fascinated Sadie for a long time! I'd been stalking this store online bc there are no locations near us and they weren't selling online. We happened on one near the Empire Stare building and ended up buying 2 big bags of clothes for the whole family! Love this place-fun, funky, quality clothes at amazing prices.

Sadie lady passed out on Chris' shoulder in Eataly which was an awesome, tasty adventure.

I'm a huge sucker for a cheese plate. The mostardo on the plate was so amazing we bought a jar to bring home!

"Mama! This noodle is Sadie size!"

Taste testing some Parmesan after learning how they cut it from a huge wheel

Waiting for our authentic Italian lunch (which was aaaaamazing)

See the Empire State Building sticking up in the back?

We found a fun playground across from Eataly

Circle Line boat ride was great. The Statue of Liberty was breathtaking.

Rockefeller center still had ice skating in April!

The Lego store

FAO Schwartz was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!

Quintessential New York (this and the corned beef and pastrami on rye from Carnegie's deli that we brought home!!!)

Central Park

Cab ride fun :-)

East-over 2013

Once again in our family Easter and Passover collide and are celebrated/remembered together. We had fun this year celebrating with both sides of the family and our neighbors, plus church in one day!! Marathon holidays tend to be the way we roll.

This year we also got to experience 2 different Good Friday services. I went to the first ever GF service at our church and they did over 50 baptisms! It was wonderful!!!! Chris got to join our neighbors at their Byzantine Orthodox Catholic Church which was a somber liturgy fitting for Good Friday. Very different but both good preparation for the enormously significant celebration of Easter.

Thanks also to our neighbors we learned the true origins of dyeing Easter eggs! Ironically, 30 minutes before we learned about this, we had JUST made up our own loose connection between eggs and new life and Jesus to explain to the kids why we were dyeing eggs. So, the real story is that way back in the day when Christians were proselytizing they came to pagan villages and as a way to effectively communicate about Christ, they'd learn some of the cultural rituals and weave the bible into them. So, when people used eggs as a symbol to celebrate new life in spring, the Christians began to decorate the eggs with Christian messages, concepts to communicate in a way that was already part of the people's culture. Our engines have books full of the elaborate designs and what they mean (every picture has deep symbolism) AND our neighbor Chuck has eggs he's painted that look like they should be in a museum! They're amazing and done with special tools and layers of wax on RAW, fragile eggs that had then blows out when the design in complete. Really impressive. So blessed to have our Easter enriched by new friends this year!

My matzoh ball soup helper :-)

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Finally some Snow!!!!!

*So, blogging has been the last thing on my to do list for too long and poor Sadie needs her toddlerhood recorded like Ella's was cause Lord knows I won't remember it all. So, trying to get caught up...

We waited til the end of March but finally got a decent snow! It only lasted a half a day before melting but was SO beautiful and Sadie's first real snow since she was so little last year :-)