We’re back from NYC, where I spent a week in a 16th-floor training room bathing in the glow of a Proxima projector learning Adobe Flex 2, and Lydia and Kate did the following:

• Visited every playground with a fountain south of 23rd street
• Were told by a mommy at one of the playgrounds in conversation that “the playgrounds are crowded, yes… it can get very cutthroat. But that’s good for them.” (!!!)



• Went to the Central Park Zoo and patted the polar bear on its fuzzy rump as it went swimming by (well, from the other side of a pane of thick glass)
• Visited many yarn stores and quilt stores
• Took the subway all around NYC (and every time LBY went down into the subway, she’d look up and say “Let’s go to York!”)
• Ate breakfast and lunch in the lobby of the Giraffe hotel, and danced there after dinner when the piano lady was there (she was happy to take requests, but “Old McDonald Had a Farm” doesn’t seem to be right for a crowd of Spanish businessmen and emaciated photographers with expensive haircuts and open collars.)
• Rode the carousel in Bryant Park ten times in a row — on the bench, on the frog, on the bunny, on the horse, on the bench again, etc.

I’d get a picture message every 20 minutes or so with what was going on. It was great, great, great fun to see Kate and Lydia knocking around the town having adventures. Lydia liked the food, too — we ate dinner in Mexican Radio on Lafayette while watching downtown hipsters getting private kung fu lessons in that little triangle park there, at Blue Smoke where they are going for the young-parent demographic and brought us a pig cookie to be decorated and baked, at the Mermaid Inn where we found out that MICHELLE STERN IS GOING TO HAVE A BABY YAAAAAY! (Sorry, Michelle, if that’s a secret), and at Dos Caminos, where Lydia repeatedly demanded that Genevieve accompany her to the beach RIGHT NOW.

And we had lunch at the Noho Star, and we rode the train, and Kate discovered that having a stroller means that no taxi will pick you up ever (I couldn’t believe this; we had to hide Kate and Lydia behind a minivan while I flagged the cab, then bring them out once I had the door open), and there was lots more too. It was a fun trip!