Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

We spent much of the week planning our weekend trip. We had a good time in NYC, our second time in the city, though we could have used more time. We'll have to go again soon!

We were able to visit with my friend, Holly, before she moves to the other side of the country. She was an excellent source of information of all sorts and introduced us to a fabulous Dominican restaurant just across the street from her apartment. She even humored us by coming along to some of the museums we wanted to see.

We saw a couple of excellent museums "on our way" to the city. We detoured to western Massachusetts to see Mass MOCA, which had a surprisingly large and good showing. We then headed down to a large sculpture garden, Storm King, outside NYC. We thought two hours would suffice for it, but the place was absolutely huge and we could have spent much longer walking around there. Unfortunately, our timing meant that we were pushing against the close of the gardens, so we couldn't dilly dally. We met a nice European couple with a little girl Paela's age, and the two toddlers took an immediate interest in one another while the adults chatted.

After Storm King closed, we finished our drive into the city. The next day we saw the Met, which we spent much longer at than expected. Paela fell asleep with her head buried in Wayne's arm. The rest of the time she wanted to just push her own stroller all over the place or climb the stairs. Or what we really enjoyed was when she wanted to talk about all the people and what she saw in the paintings (not always what we saw...). We made it down to a couple of galleries in Chelsea, but Saturdays are a bad day for galleries and we were a little disappointed to see not much open down there.

Sunday we hit a nice medieval museum, and Paela pushed her stroller all over. Some of the security folks gave us the evil eye until I took Paela to the gardens outside. But she loved seeing all the portrayels of "Baby Jesus" and "Mama Mary"! Later we took her to the Natural History museum, which was absolutely packed. But at least it was air conditioned. :) We all enjoyed seeing the exhibits there of monkeys and dinosaurs and a huge huge whale. The quality at the Natural History museum is amazing.

After walking through Central park, we decided we'd all kind of exhausted ourselves and opted out of the last museum on our list. Instead we walked back across Central park and watched people and bikes and horses and everything else.

On our way home we learned that Paela absolutely loves Cracker Barrel (the restaurant). She ate the best there that she had all week and did the best there of all the places we had taken her on our trip. We were amazed and relieved (since we were exhausted!). 

And that was our trip. We probably pushed Paela a bit further than she wanted, but we were able to see just about everything we had intended to. And of course there's more to entice us back again!

The rest of the week wasn't nearly as full, thankfully. Monday Paela woke up asking for Cameron. Thankfully, Camilla was awesome enough to come over that afternoon and fulfill Paela's burning desire. Wayne took advantage of the time while Paela "played" with Cameron and Camilla to take care of some errands. Though our car still isn't successfully registered in the state, because of some rules that are different from every other state we've been in, we at least made some progress. Hopefully soon we'll have that crossed off our list too.

Paela's appetite has been off and on for a few weeks now, and she started tossing food on to the floor when she gets bored with meals and wants to go play (instead of when she's actually full). We've been working on telling us she's done instead of showing us.... But this also has the unfortunate result that she's cranky because she's hungry later on, unless we give her tons of snacks. Tricky, tricky.

Her vocabulary is doing pretty well. We get full sentences some of the time, and she narrates whatever she sees along the way (or the book she's flipping through): "Paela is eating crackers. Kid running. Hello kitty. Kid playing with kitty. Peoples on train. Drums on train. Cookie -- have it? Daddy's keys, please?" Other times, her growing desire for indepence results in lots of tears and Paela lying on the ground. A handful of times she tells me that "Paela's sad" or grabs my hand to ask for my help instead of going straight to tears, and those times are nice. One of my favorite sentences was when she pushed her stroller and tripped, and the stroller fell over. Her first words: "Is stroller okay???" So concerned for the poor little stroller. What a trooper, that Paela girl.