New York City - Part 1

When we knew we were heading up north for Thanksgiving, I was so excited to go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City!  What are the chances we would be in New York on Thanksgiving again as a whole family?  But, then I started to truly imagine all that it would entail: get everyone up and bundled to ride the train into the city, find a good place - stay there for HOURS before the parade would even begin and then try to keep our four kids happy and not cold for the many hours it would last.  Our children are not big parade lovers in good weather so I didn't think I'd be able to sell the idea to them.  BUT...they blow up the balloons for the parade the night before.  So, that was our new plan, to play in New York and see the blown up balloons on the day before Thanksgiving.  We couldn't convince Aunt Michelle and Aunt Laura to join us - they were too busy preparing for Thanksgiving dinner.

Marc has a work contact that was eager to take us around New York.  Scott, and his partner Jesse, met us at the train station and they had not only rented a car so that we wouldn't have to lug our stroller all over the subways, but they had prepared an entire scavenger hunt for our children.  They had even stopped at Subway on the way to the train station and picked us up lunch.  On the train ride in, the kids had fun playing with tangoes.  But poor Cooper fell head first into the aisle, which was wet and muddy due to the weather and his clothes were covered in nastiness.  So, one of our first stops in New York was picking up a quick outfit as the extras we had brought were too small for him.  The kids each got their own disposable camera for the trip and I think they had used up their pictures within the first hour. They got so excited they couldn't stop snapping away.

We were so excited to see the Christmas Tree in Rockerfeller Center but it was still being decorated.  So, in reality, we saw a little tree and a lot of scaffolding.  The kids also wanted to go ice-skating, but not only were we lacking in time, it was also covered to aid in the decorating of the tree.

We went to Macy's to check out their Christmas windows - which were a bit bizarre for my taste.  But, they had this cool interactive window where you could make your own ornament.  With the aid of each child, we created the lovely, red Hone Christmas Ornament.  Alas, we couldn't get it to send it to the main computer where it would have created our ornament and we could have purchased it.  Oh, well.  We got pictures - who needs more?  The close ups of Cooper show his healing nose where he fell out of the pod as we were packing and scraped all of the skin off of his nose.  And the red bump on the top of his forehead from his crash on the train.  This child seriously has more bumps and bruises than all of the others combined - minus Addie's broken bones.

Our fun tour guides had gotten us the express pass for The Empire State Building.  We remembered when we had gone with Coleman in July of 2004 and the wait and the heat were awful.  This time, the weather made it so bitterly cold, there was no wait whatsoever - no use for the express pass then.  We nearly froze out on the observation deck and could barely look at the camera to get the obligatory photo taken.  But when we went up even higher - we were buffered from the wind and were able to truly enjoy the spectacular views.