The weekend finally rolled around and Bryan could take a break from his difficult schedule in class. I don’t think he’s ever spent so much time working on his craft in one go before. Usually I’ve been the full-time person and he’s had a relaxed pace, but here it’s the opposite. And enjoy it we shall (all three of us actually :) ). We were determined to get out and about so we headed to the south end of Manhattan and visited the World Trade Center site. It was a difficult thing to see still in progress. They have such a wonderful plan for the space and it’s a pity it won’t be finished for such a long time. I’ve heard there’s a lot of controversy about this, but don’t know anything substantial about it. It was strange to be near the place where so many people lost their lives and loved ones. To remember the images from the television so long ago and think, “This is where some of that happened.” And now I’ve grown to love New York City quite a bit and have enjoyed the people and culture quite a bit also. It gives me more empathy for New Yorkers now. It must have been terrible here in the aftermath.
Later we walked over to the Brooklyn Bridge, along which Mr. Eliasson has installed the latest and greatest art installation ‘Waterfalls in New York’. I have to say, they were pretty neat. We could see all four as we journeyed across the bridge and it was especially cool to look directly through the boardwalk and see a rushing river below as we crossed the waterfall underneath. Of course mid-way across the bridge the inevitable happened. “I have to PEE!” This is a very big bridge by the way. Bryan took one for the team and, precariously and at great risk to his own personal hygiene, foisted that kid onto his shoulders and hauled off for Brooklyn. Let me just say that Brooklyn sucks at public amenities……… but we finally invaded an elegant cafe and boot-legged their bathroom. I feel bad about that, but it was either that or him peeing on their beautiful flowers. Eventually we did find a park out on the pier and had a lot of fun in a sandbox. Lots of great pictures.
Sunday was rainy and un-inviting and laundry was the order of the day. You don’t want it to pile up a lot because you have to haul it around by mule… ahem… I mean… hand. Then napped, goofed-around, called friends. When the day finally cooled off we took a great walk out to the Hudson River for the view. It was amazingly beautiful. I’ve never seen fireflies before. They are SO cool! Anybody who is used to fireflies will laugh, but I was totally blown away at how ethereal they were rising up above the cool grass in great shiny clouds. Now I understand why the Victorians believed in fairies.
Requisite slideshow :)
Melodie, my dear mom-in-law, has always been a devoted mom and teacher as long as I’ve known her. Now she is actually employed as a teacher and works incredibly hard to enrich the lives of her many students and colleagues. This year she made a tremendous effort to integrate the blogging concept into her classroom to help keep her students engaged and their parents informed. I’m told it was a huge success with the parents, who could read about the concepts covered in class and the homework assignments handed out, as well as see fun videos and slideshows of the classroom. Never one to rest on her laurels, Melodie was so brave and turned in a great video to the Tech My Classroom competition, letting them know exactly what their classroom needed and how they would use it to best advantage. AND OF COURSE SHE WON!!! HA! BRILLIANT! Now Melodie’s classroom will be re-invented with new carpet, desks, computer workstations, smart-boards, networking, and new resources to get the job done. Now all they need to do is give her administrative privileges on the network… :). Congratulations Melo!
After a comment from Bryan on the fatness of the local squirrel population:
Asher: (lecturing tone) Dad, fat is NOT a nice word.
Bryan: Well, it’s only bad if you’re saying it to be mean… sometimes it’s the only way to say it… like daddy (lifts shirt and wiggles a belly roll) is fat on his tummy…. it’s kinda squishy, but your tummy is flat.
Asher: And mommy too?
Daddy: Well, mommy has some fat, but not on her tummy like Daddy……
Asher: (grinning) But her boobs are fat….
From my ever-so-observant son. :) Nobody ever tells you about the semantic minefields you have to explain to your brain-to-mouth children. Most of the time it’s incredibly charming, but exasperating when on a bus next to an attractive black man who has an awesome Lenny Kravitz thing going on with his hair, dreads every which way, and your son has been raised in lily fair Utah. He can’t resist pointing out how funny this man’s hair is to him at full volume. As the parents of such a child, or really any child because I’m sure they all do this, you just have got to slap your forehead and suck up your pride. We’re trying to get Asher to whisper his thoughts in our ears now. :) If you have any “My Child Said THIS in a Crowded Room” stories, please feel free to add to the comments - I’d LOVE to hear them. Especially YOU AUNTIES!~!!!! Since I hear you’ve been reading every so often! What’s the best thing your kids have said that still gives you the heebie-jeebies?
So all it took was riding the subway one time with Daddy and now Asher’s fine. Something about having that Y-chromosome… some macho thing. ;) I don’t get it but am happy to benefit from it. In fact now he likes riding the subway so much that he doesn’t want to get off because he’s figured out that that is when the walking begins.
One thing I’ve realized is that a lot of the things that are terribly interesting to me are not very much so to Asher. We’ve got to compromise on our itinerary. Either half of the day spent in a museum and the other half spent in the park or one day spent trekking around and the next day just doing kid stuff. This should be a great trip for him too. And that’s what we did yesterday. Stayed in Hoboken and climbed around the local park for a few hours and ate lunch at his favorite junk food place before meeting Bryan and Danny Grant for dinner. It ended up being a really interesting day finding out more about how people live here, especially if they have children. For one thing, on any given day at the park here in Hoboken you’ll find at least a half-dozen kids and mostly nannies. One awesome little guy named Logan (yes Asher loved his fellow namesake) was being cared for by a woman from Trinidad who was also there with her daughter who was caring for another brunette named Adam. I asked my new nanny friends if they were live-ins or what their particular situation was and I guess they’d been caring for these two boys since they were infants and spent the majority of the day with them. Very opinionated ladies too. Wow, they had a few things to tell me. But it all went well and we had a lot of fun. We saved a purse for a harried lady who came back about an hour later in tears. Poor soul! She was so grateful she bought Asher an ice cream. :) Wahoo! Good deeds done for their own sake? That lesson was lost on Ash this time around.
That evening we had the pleasure of meeting up with Danny Grant, one of Jacob Collin’s full-time students at the Waterstreet Atelier. He showed us around their marvelous set-up and it was neat to think of what a small group of like-minded artists COULD be if we could get that sort of thing together in Salt Lake City. Lots of paintings in progress to view and talk about. I think Bryan and Danny probably could have talked in there for hours but Asher’s small tummy couldn’t take it. We went out to dinner at what is likely to be the most expensive place we’ll eat this summer…. let’s see… the Belle Blu round the corner somewhere in the Upper East Side near Seventieth and Lexington?? The pretty blue? The ambience was great, the food even better and the company the best.
Here’s a (high-res) slideshow to recap the day on Fifth Avenue, Hoboken Park and our dinner with Danny. We spent today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art but it didn’t last long due to a blister. I think we’ll go back there later so we’ll save those photos for then. In the meantime …..Enjoy!
Spent the day hanging out at Bryant Park in the middle of town with Bryan and meeting and chatting with his new friends from the Academy. They all seem really, really nice and cool. It’s neat to hear their different histories and find out what eventually brought them to the GCA. Many of them have studied art quite a bit but it doesn’t seem like a lot of them do it professionally at this point in time. I’m glad to know that Bryan is in such good company for the bulk of the day. They had to leave for class eventually so Asher and I took a very long walk up Fifth Avenue up to Central Park. The weather was so much nicer today but it is still hot and every time we’d duck into a shop ever few blocks we were relieved with a wave of air conditioning. The streets are still chaotic and full of tourists (can’t say much except that I’m staying here a bit longer than the average tourist) but it was still neat to see the store fronts and buildings of famous designers and look into their boutiques. Normally I think I would have ducked into a few of them since it’s not the kind of thing you see that much of in Utah, but then I thought of trying to manage an over-stimulated four-year-old in the presence of some well-coiffed and chic boutique director and it just seemed like too much work. We lingered at the fountains outside of Rockefeller Center. The architecture and interior design is art deco and really striking - something I’ll have to take Bryan to see eventually. After asking about a tour up to the top however I was told that they won’t allow kids six or under. I can’t imagine why not unless the observation deck is not well fenced, an idea that seems ludicrous for such a tall building. We’ll have to see about that. At the corner of Central Park is Asher’s new favorite haunt, F.A.O Schwarz. (”Can we go there again tomorrow?”) The next few hours were like… well… like kids in a toy shop? The Bruder section alone blew my mind - I was sorely tempted to grab something for Jack for Christmas and then swing by the American Girl store for the Weasel, but the thought of having to carry so many things home in a suitcase was also daunting. Sorry dearies! We made it out of F.A.O Schwarz alive with a minor purchase of a relatively small fork-lift and no broken hearts. Yay!! Not bad for a store like that. We strolled over to the Children’s Zoo in Central Park, our original destination, so late that it wouldn’t be worth our time to pay for the tickets and just get kicked out twenty minutes later.
So then I decided we should take the subway back to midtown. Holy Hannah! You’d think I’d asked Asher to jump into a raging, spitting volcano. We’ve taken it a total of four times now and each time it is a sequence of absolute and utter panic/meltdown on the subway platform, clinging to mom’s neck, practically pulling my shirt off, and then we get on, it starts to move and he’s like, “Hey this is kinda fun. I like the subway Sam-I-Am! Not bad, not bad at all - and we don’t have to walk?? BONUS!” And he’s fine until I try to take him down the dreaded stairs into the ground again. Anybody have any thoughts about this? It seems to be getting a smidge better each time we do it, but if anyone knows of a bonafied snake-oil for this issue, please let me know!
Upon entering the Most Holy Temple of F.A.O Schwarz this afternoon:
Asher: Oh!!… oh!!!… (slaps head with both hands)… this is the best place EVER!!!!!
It’s been a wild few days here and a huge learning curve dealing with city life. The biggest change is of course not having a car. Asher has been in walking training the last couple of months but it has only just taken the edge off the rough truth. We HAVE to take subways and buses (or even worse WALK aaahhhh!!!) instead of riding in a comfy car everywhere. And mom seems intent on seeing the bulk of the island before we leave. Yesterday we took the subway down to Chambers and then walked to the Washington Market Park. We passed by the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on the way to the Hudson River and the Governor Nelson Rockefeller Park, my vote for best not-Central-Park park. Lots of kids, views and some very strange sculpture along the way. The weather wasn’t the most cooperative though… it drizzled throughout the day and we put our umbrellas to very good use. We made new friends in the parks and saw some really amazing views of the Hudson River from the southwest boardwalk of the island. We stopped for lunch at the yacht harbor outside the World Financial Center (lots of suits and ties) and then took a very long walk down to Robert Wagner Park. Asher was a total trooper for that part and even I was exhausted when we reached our destination. We kicked our shoes off and took a little nap under lush trees. Finally we stopped by the Museum of Jewish Heritage - Holocaust Memorial. Asher didn’t really appreciate this last part but I learned a lot and they had the most marvelous LED and sun/water-interface generated contemplation room at the top of the museum. We caught the bus back to mid-town just in time for dinner at an amazing pizza joint off of Broadway. After listening in on a few conversations here and there, I have to concur with Klotz - Don’t argue with New Yorkers about baseball or pizza. That would be a grave mistake.
The adventure today was to simply get some laundry done. Yesterday was such a trek that Asher and I needed a break. After packing about two loads of laundry into a sack and throwing it over my back (ugh!) we tried to find the local laundromat. We were a few blocks off at first. It was a frustrating morning. Now I’m no slouch, but getting the front-loading washers to work correctly was mind boggling to me. I ended up having to run the damn thing twice (and at $6 a pop you don’t want to be doing that more than once). We tried to pass the time at a cafe across the street but that ended up being really frustrating because it was not the most kid-friendly joint or staff. Oh well, we’re learning. A downpour kept us at the laundromat a little longer, but finally the sun came out and we walked back home ready to relax. I hope Bryan had a less stressful day than we did - maybe he’ll make dinner :). Oh and the one thing I do want to say about New York - it’s HUMID! Holy cow it just feels sticky all the time. Even Asher is commenting on the sticky air. Patrick, I need to know what to do with my afro hair!!! Help me! Anyone? Hairspray? Gel? I dunno. Maybe it’s just going to be fluffy like that.
For a high resolution slideshow click here.
I really want to spend some time talking about our first real day in New York City, but I’m completely exhausted and still trying to figure out this embedded slideshow thingy. This will have to suffice. Usually the grandmas are content with photos as opposed to my yammering. Enjoy!!
For a higher resolution version of this slideshow click here.
Many people who are familiar with Bryan’s blog Rationalart also know that I used to post a fair amount on art-related topics and items in the news that I found interesting and funny. When Bryan took more of a shine to it, I thought it likely that a lot of our visitors would be more interested in hearing from the artist himself (were he social enough to post… tee hee) as opposed to his wife describing what was going on from day to day. Since then I haven’t posted very much on Rationalart because not enough of what I want to post actually passes the litmus test for ‘art-related’, ‘pertinent’, ‘interesting to art-fan readers’, or even ‘interesting’ period. And that should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of topics I am most likely to cover here. HOWEVER, I am lucky enough to be spending two months in New York City and will make the most of every day and make the most of a new camera that Bryan twisted my arm into purchasing recently. I promise lots of descriptions of everywhere we go and lots of pictures and slideshows for our sweet family, lovely friends, awesome neybs (Go Red Sox!), and even a few coworkers who keep me sane (thank you Eric for talking me into going - best idea EVER.) Some will be visiting us later this summer and I must say to them, “GET YOUR FANNYS OUT HERE BECAUSE IT’S FREAKIN’ AWESOME!”