New York, New York

During my lifetime I have lived in two New Yorks. The first was the town of Somers, New York, where I lived from the age of 9 until I graduated from college. It's the town where my brother now lives in the house where we all grew up. The other New York -- the one visited only on class trips or the very occasional tour with kids from AFS (I think that happened only once) -- is the place where I lived for about seven years in the 1980s. Five of those years were great, the last two -- not so much fun. I visit that first New York very frequently, but the second New York I hadn't revisited for 20 years despite the fact that my sister-in-law lives there. THAT if nothing else should tell you how deep the grudge I had against New York ran.

However, my mother-in-law is summering in that city so I -- being the PERFECT daughter-in-law -- decided to meet with New York again, and have a little mediation session. I would say maybe I had judged it so harshly for way too long and it would say it was sorry for forcing me to run screaming from the mean streets to the unlikely and frankly not much more fun New Milford, Connecticut.

I'm happy to report that the mediation could not have gone better and I actually (gulp!) had a great time in the city. Here are the pictures to prove it.

Hello NY -- this is the view from New Jersey. Lizzie was beyond excited when she saw all the tall buildings and told us she couldn't wait to go into a skyscraper and then was very disappointed that Grandma didn't live in one:

This is the way we got into NYC and I must report that as much as I did like being back in the city, I still feel the exact same way about that long, smelly, shiny tunnel. But since I wasn't driving I survived:

Hannah and Lizzie at the gate of Grandma's little courtyard apartment in Greenwich Village:

Trevor, Grandma Connie's 13-year-old Golden Retriever who is quite the city dog despite being raised at the Jersey Shore. Trevor loves walking to Washington Square Park and all over the neighborhood, proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks:

Uncle Dude and Grandma outside her courtyard mews. There are several apartments surrounding a little courtyard garden with trees and herbs growing. It's really nice, as is her street which is incredibly quiet for being only a couple blocks off 6th Ave.

Hannah and Liz at the fountain at Washington Square Park. I used to spend time here when I was in the Village and let me tell you they really cleaned up this park! However, there are still way too many people here for me to consider it an ACTUAL park, but Hannah and Liz liked the three different jazz bands that were playing and the people playing chess:

If you didn't know that Rob and Uncle Dude were brothers, you would from this picture (please excuse their white socks -- they are not city boys):

Hannah getting her NYC look on:

This is the courtyard outside of the apartment. It's not the best picture of Aunt Linda or Hannah, but it was such a great picture of the patio furniture that I had to include it. Grandma's yet-to-be-used gas grill is right behind Hannah. The Rasmussens are more charcoal people, so they don't know how prefer to use a gas grill:

Here's Lizzie inside Grandma's apartment. This is the living room (it's got a large bedroom with a fireplace, too). She looks quite relaxed here (we were all pooped out from walking around) but when we first got there my little nature lover noted the bars on the windows and the low ceilings and the 6 people in a very small space and remarked that she felt like she was in a cage:

For me, though, this pictures shows a happy coincidence that occurred. We were walking to our lunch place and things started to look VERY VERY familiar to me. We passed a couple of vest pocket parks and buildings that just seemed really familiar. When we got to the restaurant, I looked down the street and saw this. This is an apartment where I spent many, many happy times in NYC. It's on Carmine Street and the restaurant that is there now (a pizza place where ironically Grandma Connie said she got the best pizza she's had in the city) used to be Mexico Next to Texaco (the Texaco station is gone and there is a new building there) and I lived right above it. The window with the air conditioner and the one to the left of it were my windows. Seeing it again after 20 years brought all sorts of great memories flooding back for me. It wasn't EXACTLY the same as NYC offering an apology, but it was close enough:

 

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!! This trip to New York, also included a trip to the OTHER New York where we hung out with my brother's family and celebrated my nephew's 9th birthday.

Here Hannah is conferring with Riley, one of Tommy's good friends:

Aunt Tina brought a slip n' slide for the party and Lizzie tried NOT to slip or slide:

Hannah, on the other hand, got right into it:

So then, of course Lizzie did, too:

Aunt Tina donated the slip n slide, but she did not use it. Here she is with my niece Brenna:

I personally filled 4,246 water balloons, so that they could be used in a giant water balloon fight that lasted about 32 seconds. Here Lizzie just misses the mark tossing one at Charlie, one of Tommy's friends:

 Here's the whole gang the next morning, Tommy's actual 9th birthday. Hannah and Lizzie did NOT want to leave, but luckily we'll be seeing everyone in the Poconos in a few weeks:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOMMY!!!

Here are some slightly artsy fartsy photos of New York:

This bench is in Grandma's courtyard

This is one of my favorite pictures of Hannah. I'm not sure if the flare on her right is caused by the sun (it wasn't in the other photos) or if PaPa came to NYC with us:

This is the top of the library in Katonah that I snapped in the early morning sun after I dropped Rob off at the train station to go back down to the city to visit Ellis Island with his family (the girls and I were staying in Somers for the birthday BBQ):

Summer Count Up 4

This week is missing Saturday because we are travelling, which means, of course MORE pictures sometime during the week. I'll include Saturday's "official" picture in next week's count up, but here's what we did this past week through Friday.

Day 18: It was the 4th of July weekend and I'm pretty sure there's some sort of law that requires the eating of ice cream. So being the law abiding citizens that we are, we went over to the Coventry Ice Cream Parlor and did our civic duty:

Day 19: Day 19 was the 4th of July so we decided (all of us!) to go to the fireworks. Except that we don't really go to the fireworks, we go to the Boscov's parking lot where we can spread out and lounge around while watching the fireworks. As you can see, Hannah and Lizzie have the experience down to a science with their blankets and pillows and dog. Rob is also prepared with a bag of chocolate covered oreos:

Day 20: I try to buy my milk at a local dairy, whenever possible. It's not certified organic, but they don't use hormones or antibiotics -- and it just tastes really good and fresh. When the girls go with me, we like to go into the barns and see if there are any baby cows. We lucked out this time because there were TWO baby cows. We did not luck out because it was extremely humid and since this is a real working farm, it had a real working stink. But we hung out with the babies, and the big cows for a while, thanked them for the milk and then went into the farm store where it did not smell and were we bought milk and several containers of candy:

Day 21: A fairly lazy day. We ate lunch out on the deck (it was fresh cherries and crackers with jam) and took some time to talk to Daddy while we ate:

Day 22: You can see how excited Hannah is with our Thursday activity. I needed to get the oil changed in my car, so here we are waiting for it to be finished. It was the next car after the one you can see in the background. The whole thing took only about 30 minutes and both Hannah and Liz managed to eat four pretzels each during this time, and Lizzie even  found time to complain that I wouldn't make her hot chocolate, when it was 93 degrees outside:

Day 23: We went swimming with friends at the pool (see how crowded it is??!!) I love the fact that my daughters get along so well with my friends' daughters -- it makes coffee breaks that much easier. Here are Hannah, Zoe, Izabella and Lizzie about 30 seconds before it started to downpour and we had to leave the pool. Luckily we got in a lot of fun before that:

Bonus Photo: Since it was the 4th of July, it's a fireworks picture:

Summer Count Up, 3

Re-entry after vacation is usually difficult. Seriously I think we need to take MORE vacations, so we are used to getting back into the swing of things after the vacation. Anyway. I heard a lot of "I'm BORED" this week. And for some reason, when I suggested reading or doing a math worksheet, no one was THAT bored. Boredom does spark some creativity, though.

Day 11: On Sunday Lizzie took some of my pipe cleaners (one thing we have a LOT of in this house is/are crafting materials) and made her own peacock. Pretty good, don't you think?:

Day 12: On Monday we were able to get back to our pool. Hannah and Lizzie are little daredevils, always looking for ways to give me heart attacks. This week they started diving into the pool holding hands. Now while that may not SOUND dare-devilly, Lizzie likes to dive OUT and Hannah likes to dive DOWN, so the laws of physics are not in their favor:

Day 13: Blueberries have been on special all week. The local orchards are full of them and so I felt it was my duty to buy a lot of them, because they are healthy. Once I bought them I took away every single health property by mixing them in a cake batter and then topping it with sugar, butter, flour and cinnamon. Hannah and Liz were my accomplices in this process. Here, they are putting the topping on the extremely tasty Blueberry Buckle we made on Tuesday:  

Day 14: Dress-up just NEVER gets old in this house. Here's a picture of my three puppies. I can guarantee you that two of them are well-trained. But I'm not saying which two:

 Day 15: We introduced Cash to Rita's Water Ice. Here he's tasting a sugar-free pineapple ice. As a poodle he insists on watching his weight:

Day 16: Here's a group of kids belonging to my friends who are also friends of Hannah and Lizzie (because we make them play together on a regular basis so we can drink coffee and talk -- also several of them are in my Brownie Troop!) We had our book club meeting at the park on Friday and took the kids over to splash around in the creek. It was positively magical that afternoon and reminded me of my own childhood just being a kid having fun with a big group of my friends. So I made the picture in black and white to emphasize that:

Day 17: I spent the morning at the Farmer's Market in Elverson and here's my market basket -- six ears of corn, a quart of cherries, three Persian cucumbers (which tasted pretty much like American cucumbers), five juicy tomatoes, a pound of wax beans and a head of cabbage. I was hoping to score a dozen free-range eggs, too, but the chickens let me down:

See you all next Sunday, if not before. We're enjoying a lovely (hot and humid) 4th of July weekend, and hope that you are, too!

Non-Beach Babes

We do a lot each week we are at the shore and only a small portion of it has to do with the beach. It's a very exciting time getting ready for visiting Grandma and this year I decided that the girls were ready to help pack their own things. Hannah jumped in immediately and packed nine (NINE!!) bags. That was okay, but not ONE of the bags contained any CLOTHES. These were all the toys that she decided she couldn't live without for seven days. Lizzie, as you can see, wasn't as enthusiastic about packing her own stuff:

 Cash joined us on this trip and I have to say that I was NOT looking forward to that. But it turned out that he was the best traveler of the three "kids" in the back seat:

Here's Rob, the girls and grandma Connie at the 101st Street Pavilion. Connie's spending the summer in New York City, but took a break to host us at her house:

Rob and I pitched in the cooking. Here he made his world famous Scampi, which was loved by everyone (except me, but I don't like shrimp and made my own seared swordfish). As usual Hannah helped prepare the scampi:

This is Lizzie and a friend at Reed's Beach. Reed's Beach is well known for the horseshoe crabs that crawl up to the shore to lay eggs and then get flipped over on their backs by the incoming or outgoing tide, and then get eaten by the seagulls. When I lived here I'd go there often and toss the crabs back into the ocean before they died. Lizzie wanted to do the same thing, but first, she is afraid of horseshoe crabs and second, they were all dead already:

Hannah took a different tack and just chased the seagulls away over and over again. And over and over again, again:

 

A new wrinkle in our shore trip was biking. We brought all of our bikes down to the shore and rode them every day. And by WE I mean everyone EXCEPT ME. I tried one, pedalled twice, fell off (actually it was more of a dive off) and gave my bike to Grandma Connie to ride:

Look at them go:

One of the highlights of the week is the big fish barbecue. We grill several different types of fish as well as dogs and burgers and serve it up with salads. It was delicious this year as always. And we enjoyed it with some family friends, Gail and Emma Jean

We also took some time (three times, actually) to celebrate Uncle Dude's birthday. Here he is getting some help blowing out the candles on some cheesecake:

Here's some of the grilling team for the evening. I was inside manning the fry pan for some more seared salmon and sword. Hannah things grilling is FUN, but about 35 seconds after this picture was taken she was dancing around the backyard and stuck her hand on the grill. Which meant I had to take a quick ride down to the CVS to get some burn cream. She was fine as soon as I got back with the burn cream and some candy:

Here's the other integral part of the grill team: Uncle Dude -- who I'm pretty sure is wearing the Giants shirt to appease the Garritys who may read this:

We brought a lot of memories home with us, but not much sand. Rob cleaned out the car and took it over to vacuum it so that it would not enter Pennsylvania with us. However I can tell you that quite a bit made it into our suitcases, shoes, shovels and pails. But it was a nice try:

Rob and I love to look at property that we can't (yet) afford. Here he is standing on the balcony of some condo in Diamond Beach that is being auctioned off for about $1million. Nice beach views. But, you know, I don't really like the beach:

It turns out that the dogs really did get along and Cash will be welcomed back on subsequent visits. He woke us up at 6 a.m. the first morning, but that was probably due to the excitement of zoo camp. Once he found out he wasn't going, he slept in until 8 like the rest of us (wanted to):

Lizzie and Rob dazzled everyone with their duet of "Linus and Lucy" while Hannah did her own interpretation:

Lizzie relaxing:

Hannah REALLY relaxing:

A nice picture of Grandma Connie and her girls:

A nice picture of Aunt Linda and Hannah:

 Here's today's arty photo -- Hannah dancing in the sunset over Reed's Beach: