Lake Placid and such

   
Shortly before we moved to New York, I came across a book about Adirondack State Park. Upstate New York, bigger than many national parks, mountains and forests and lakes. The pictures took my breath away. "Oliver! We have to go there this summer!"

And then suddenly it was 2009. That turned into 2010, rolled on into 2011... you get it. It was always at the top of our list of places to go (oh, the hiking!), but always got pushed down somehow. Later. Next season. We've already rented a car so many times recently... let's wait a bit.

Would we ever have gone if my parents didn't book a week for our whole family at a time share? Thank goodness someone else kicked our butts into gear. Because, wow. We are sooo going back this summer to hike. (For real! We really mean it this time!)

Running around outside - can you see the ski jump off in the distance? Built for the 1980 Olympics, I believe.

Hiking up Cascade Mountain. Maybe you can tell by our attire - we weren't really dressed for hiking. We toughed it out. 

Side trip to Vermont. The Lake Champlain ferry approaches. Giving credit where it's due: photo taken by my brother.

Thing #2

Thing 2 on our list of things to do in NYC this year: Go to Harlem. Eat some good food.

We rode the 2 all the way up to 125th Street this Saturday. After the long ride we stretched out our legs at Marcus Garvey Park - first the playground:

then the overlook:

Quite the view up there. And we had the whole plaza to ourselves! We wandered back and forth until one of us decided it was time to go.

After a bit of strolling we went to Sylvia's, a restaurant we have been meaning to visit for the last 4 years. (4 years in New York! How is that possible?) I couldn't wait to see what Nils thought of the food. He loved the cornbread...

but alas, fell asleep before the collared greens came out. Such is life.

And yes, that is a hamburger in front of Nils. Oliver goes to New York's premier soul food restaurant and orders a burger. What can you do?

10 things: #1

 

1. New York is a feast. I have never been anywhere where there was so much energy, so much going on. Constantly. You can never hope to take it all in, and you can never complain that you are bored. It can be tempting to throw your hands up in the air - too many choices! Alternatively, maybe you can make a list. (you list maker, you!)

2. I've got a friend back in Wisconsin who has a great project going on. She has written up a list of 52 things she wants to do this year. It's a really neat variety of things: bake bread, go ice skating, give money to an animal shelter. She's blogging about it, and I've been following along. Fun to read, and inspiring.

Taking my cue from her, I've come up with a list of my own. Only it's a little shorter: 10 things to do in New York this year. We're always talking about doing this and that, then time passes and we're still just cleaning the apartment and going to the park. This list should be just the kick in the butt we need. And look, we can already cross off #1!

Thing #1: Go to an Off-Broadway Play


New York (obviously) has a great theater thing going on Broadway, but there is so much more to the theater world than the dozen or so pieces that have made it big. What about the smaller, more experimental stuff?

We went to the Bushwick Starr last night, a Brooklyn performance space carved out of a warehouse. The audience sat in mismatched chairs, some from Ikea. The young playwright filled in for an injured actress. The play was equal parts entertaining and disturbing, and ended with a group of young women, many of whom had been sexually abused, tearing another woman apart and eating her flesh. It was intimate, out there, and thought-provoking. I loved it.

Thing #1.5: have a drink and a conversation before the show

#21 in progress

This is what lunch looks like. Not every lunch, exactly. But this is what it often looks like. Little man in his high chair, sippy cup begging to be tossed to the floor. Laptop on, logged in to Rosetta Stone.


Yeah. Rosetta Stone.


I made a "life list" when I turned 30, and #21 is raise my children to be bilingual. English - German, obviously. The tricky thing here is that I'm hardly fluent. I probably should have made #21 read make Oliver raise my children to be bilingual, but that wouldn't make sense now, would it. Making someone else do the heavy lifting for my life list.


There are some obstacles:

• As I just said, I am not a fluent German speaker. I can read children's stories, and I can have simple conversations, but I do not have the thousands-of-words-vocabulary that I imagine is necessary to pass a language on to someone else.
• Lessons for me are not an option right now. I guess I could drag Nils to a class with me... *shudder*
• Oliver, our German-language ace in the hole, does not see much of Nils from Monday to Friday. At most, they get a few minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night. At most.
• On the weekends, Oliver is hesitant to bust out the mother tongue. For whatever reason, he feels funny doing it in front of me. 

Here's what we have going for us:

• I have time with Nils. 5 solid days a week.
• I have access to Rosetta Stone's online learning system.
• I really want Nils to learn German.

When we sit down to lunch then, when I know we're going to be in one place for a good 15 minutes, I often fire up the German. Is this going to make Nils fluent? Hardly. It's the best I can do right now though, and it's a lot better than nothing. It keeps me learning, it gets me talking to him (with guaranteed proper grammar), and it keeps the language on my mind, making me more likely to cajole Oliver into a conversation of his own.


Not too terrible.

Feats of athleticism

 

Oliver made a new year's resolution of sorts back in January - start biking to work. I kind of had my eyebrows raised (is it feasible? Is it safe? Are you really going to stick with it?), but it has been a month now and he's going strong. Going strong and really enjoying it. He even launched into this sort-of romantic description recently of biking through neighborhoods, watching the trucks make early morning deliveries in Chinatown, crossing the bridge and watching the skyline unfold before him each morning. For a man who describes most things as "okay", this was a bit like watching him weep tears of joy.

A quick visual:

He starts out in Brooklyn, crosses the Manhattan bridge and scoots his way up 2nd Avenue until he reaches his office in Midtown. An 8 mile trip - that's 16 miles of biking each day. Impressive, no? I'm certainly impressed.

Not to be outdone, Nils has been working on his own athletic goals. Namely: walking! He started a few days before his birthday and is now up and running all over the place.

He is so proud of himself.

The stoop gods continue to be kind

                       
I have mentioned our neighborhood in the past; it's a high-class scavenger's paradise. You want furniture? Great world literature? Toys? Housewares? No problem.


I have been an active participant in this scene since we moved here 2 and a half years ago. I've put things out, rifled through boxes, and come home on more than one occasion screeching "Oliver, look what I found!" I knew (knew!) if I waited long enough I would find a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. My most dramatic find: a Stokke Tripp Trapp chair (hellooooo $300 high chair) that needs a new coat of paint.


Paradise!


Some recent finds:

A giant basket that holds all our shopping bags, umbrellas, flashlights, etc. I do love an organized closet. Especially when you pay nothing to organize it.

Some fun-looking old books. Maybe Nils and I will read these together someday. Maybe I'll just read them on my own.

Stacking rings and stacking boxes (Nils seen wincing mid-topple with the boxes). People leave out some beautiful toys, and with a good cleaning they're like new. He loves stacking things, so the more the merrier.

And finally, his favorite toy. These are gears that spin together when you turn the toy on. He's drawn like a magnet to this thing every time I put it out. Do we have a little engineer on our hands? (Oliver certainly has his fingers crossed.)

A tour of Nils's room

Have I ever shown you Nils's room? No? It's actually pretty cute. It's the smallest room in our apartment, and also the only one we painted. (Correlation?) It's a peaceful little corner - I've always thought so, anyhow. Find Nils while we're putting him down for the night and you might get a different story. We've read many stories in the rocking chair, pulled many toys off the toy shelves.


Excuse me Nils, please let us in. Toots, can you let us in? 


This is his favorite game right now. He closes the door, and waits for you to open it so he can close it again. Very funny.

Yes yes, you are so clever.

There's not too much to the tour, since it's a pretty small space.We've got light gray walls and your typical baby furnishings. If I can, I'd like to direct your attention to the quilt on the rocking chair, window treatment, and crib bumpers. Nils has quite the grandma; she made all these things for him.

One other touch that I love: the grouping of pictures on the wall:

They're illustrations from The Runaway Bunny. I bought a used paperback and ripped out a couple pages; one represents Oliver and the other is me. I'll let you guess which of us is the Alpine mountain climber in a Swiss/Bavarian-style hat.

Simple but sweet, no? Nils has a lot of fun in here (as long as no one is trying to make him sleep). And look! I do believe he's about to start in on his second favorite game - taking his toys and throwing them on the floor. Cleanup? Someone else takes care of that.


To me though, there is another side to this room. Let's look at that last picture one more time:

I'm pretty proud of myself for this. I have always been a secondhand furnisher, and for Nils I did my best to re purpose our own things or find new ones through secondhand channels. His things were inexpensive, and they are both unique and easy on the earth. We have even found some secondhand books and toys (mixed among their new counterparts) - a small feat given the fact that we don't live anywhere near family or friends with older children.