New York (the First Trip)

The kids had only been back from FSY for a few short days when we loaded up the van and headed to... New Jersey!  And also New York!

Craig had been wanting to show the kids his hometown, which was fair.  We've been back to Bainbridge Island countless times and stayed with my parents and visited all my favorite places, but the last time we visited New Jersey was when Kendra was a baby.  So it was definitely time!  We began at our favorite grocery store, Delicious Orchards!  I love that place so much.  It just is filled with good food everywhere.  Every piece of produce looks perfect and healthy, and the prepared foods are all amazing.  We would get eclairs any time we went, and we got them this time, too.  It was so fun!

Bentley trying to find the bottom of the apple barrel

Bentley had to be a weirdo and get doughnuts instead of an eclair...

Next we stopped by Craig's elementary school

And Craig's house!  I have to say-- it was much cuter when Craig lived there!  It was yellow with green shutters.  Who paints a house brown and just gets rid of the shutters???  Still, it was fun to see, and to visit his old neighborhood!

We got pizza from Attilio's

And brought it to the Saint Leo's Carnival to enjoy it!

So that was a quick trip through Lincroft, but it was a lovely trip down memory lane.  Craig grew up in such a cute town, and I feel like New Jersey often gets a bad rap (either because people assume it all looks like Newark, or they've been watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey), so it's nice that our kids will understand a little better what their father's childhood actually looked like!

Then we continued on to Leah and Brian's house in Eastchester!  By the time we arrived we pretty much just brought all our stuff inside and put the kids to bed.  The next day Eliot and Theo still had school and Leah had to go in to work, so we bummed around the house while Brian fed us so much food.  And then finally in the evening we got pizza (more pizza!!)

and put Bentley in charge so the grown ups could drive into the city to see Moulin Rouge!

This set was AMAZING.  So Baz Luhrmann...

The show was so great.  I was entranced-- ENTRANCED-- the entire time.  It was so nice of Leah to take us!  

Love the "L'amour" painted on the building!

As we walked back to the car, Brian took "incriminating" photos, hoping to get Bishop Smith released from his calling!  😂😂😂

No dice there, I'm afraid, Brian, but I appreciated the attempt!

The next day my *cousin Jan came to see us!  We hadn't seen her since our last New York trip in 2018, so it was wonderful getting to catch up and get her reacquainted with all my kids!

Colton and Theo definitely look like they're related

Griffey had to have surgery on his leg that week, so he was forced to wear the Cone of Shame.  Poor puppy!

And here we are with Jan!

The Maddens had a neighborhood pool party with a food truck, so we got to enjoy that before it began raining and I (fearing for my library book) hurried us all back to the house.  Then it never really rained!  What jerk weather!  But we'd had fun before that!

And then on Saturday we took the kids into the city!  Traffic was light, so we got there in just a half hour, and then used our trick of parking underneath the Museum of Natural History!  Then I let Bentley have my phone so he could take a billion selfies using the 0.5 lens.  Don't worry, I will NOT be posting all of them here.  But you will get a lot more pictures than if I'd been holding my phone the entire time!

The whole gang (Brian stayed home to keep an eye on Griffey) (Ryder is sort of hiding behind Eliot back there, but he's there!)

Me and Leah

(But I probably will post way more than you care about seeing!  Sorry!!!)

I mostly just love Ryder photobombing us here

Someone left this little toy dinosaur on one of the description panels, and this photo cracks me up

Bentley's faces in these pictures also crack me up

Cute Kendra

We'd wandered through the main dinosaur wings when we got to this titanosaur, which I'd never seen before-- turns it out was new since we last came here!!!  Even longer than a blue whale, this must be the biggest animal to have ever walked on earth!  

Unfortunately, it was in this room that we realized we'd lost Colton. Craig quickly retraced our steps and found him almost immediately coming towards us with a guard. Phew, no big deal! As we stood around with him, teasing him for getting lost, I suddenly noticed that Colton was trying his best to not start crying.  I shooed everyone away from us, and we took a seat in front of a Meryl Streep-narrated movie about evolution.  Once he'd had some time to calm down, I asked him what had happened.  It turned out, we'd lost him in the very first dinosaur room!  You have to wander through a gift shop to get to the next room, but it's a confusing set-up, because the gift shop looks like a dead end, and only once you get all the way through it do you see that it leads to a room with more dinosaurs (including pterodactyls!), and then that room leads to the titanosaur room.  So he'd gone into the gift shop looking for us, and then gotten confused by it and gone back to the first room and finally asked a guard for help.  The guard brought him to the pterodactyl room, at which point Craig came back and found him.  So while we'd only been looking for him for about 30 seconds before we found him, he'd been feeling lost for much longer!  Poor guy!  I told him he'd done exactly right by finding a guard, and once he'd had another minute to calm down, we went back so he could see the stuff he'd missed..

Like this absolutely bizarre-o giant toad thing!

Seeing all the nutty stuff cheered him up.  I felt terrible that he'd been so scared, though!  We continued on through the ancient stuff and to the ocean room with the life-size blue whale model.  Kendra kept counting heads for me after that!

Everyone loves triceratops

Bentley took this great picture of Craig and Camille contemplating all the animals here

(See?  He's okay!)

A rare smile from Theo-- see whales make everyone happy!

Kendra looks awesome with antlers!

We probably could have spent all day at the museum, but we were getting hungry AND we had an appointment to see this awesome Harry Potter expo that Leah had heard about, so we dragged ourselves away from all the crazy animals and headed across the street to Shake Shack for some lunch, and then took the subway to Macy's.  The subway was a pain-- it turned out the train we wanted doesn't run on Saturdays, but we didn't figure that out until we'd let a couple other trains go by, and of course, it was hotter than blazes down there.  But we sorted it out all out eventually and the kids thought that riding on the (air conditioned) car was a blast, so there's that!

Everyone stands agains the wall waiting for their train now.  It's so weird.  (Theo's face combined with the thumbs up makes me laugh so much!)

The Harry Potter Expo was so fun!  They had a ton of costumes and various movie paraphernalia and I learned a ton!  And it was the perfect length of time-- maybe an hour?  An hour and a half?-- for a group like ours!

Kendra and I were slower than everyone else so I have a lot more pictures of her from here on out than the rest of the group.  But we didn't lose anyone this whole time, I promise!!!

How cute are we in Newt Scamander's suitcase?

The crystal ball told me I would win Witch Weekly's best smile!!!

So that was a lot of fun!  I wanted to make the kids walk through Macy's next, just so they could see how huge it is, but we got distracted by trying to get water and find bathrooms and by just how expensive the watches were (we could only find a couple prices, but for one pre-owned watch (which had a hot pink face and really was kind of ugly) the asking price was $13,595!!!)...  And finally we just left through a side door so we could visit the Crocs store and get water from a 7-11 across the street.  Why not?

Statue of Liberty made of crocs

Very tired kiddos

Can't wait to send this kid to BYU...  

We got off at Tracy's old stop and walked to Levain Bakery for some amazing cookies

Some guy stopped by and asked we'd seriously brought 6 kids into the city because he was super impressed.  It was a funny exchange, but after he left, I wondered what he thought if he saw Craig and Leah and then I came and joined them...  We probably looked like sister wives...!  😬

And then we hurried back to the Museum of Natural History to see their space exhibits and one about rappers' jewelry.  We forgot that the museum would be closing soon, so we didn't have much time for it, but we tried!

Kendra with a huge amethyst (we think?)

I wouldn't have minded doing a bit more while we were in the city, but the kids were all pretty tired, so we headed home.  Brian had dinner ready for us, and we watched Up (and cried at the beginning) and then enjoyed having grown up time once the kids were all in bed.  It was a great day!

And then the next morning we packed up and headed home!  It was a lovely visit!  Thanks for hosting us, Leah and Brian!!!

*Jan was actually my grandfather's cousin.  But because generations don't always line up quite right, she's really the right age to be my aunt.  So I never quite know what to call her, because either way it's confusing!  But however she's related, she's definitely family and she's lovely!