Visit from Flat Stanley

For the past week or so, we've had a very special guest visiting us from Atlanta! Our niece Catie mailed her friend Stanley for a visit. Normally, I like letting our young guests in to visit the Brooklyn Children's Museum for free, but we were closed for most of his time here. So, he didn't get to play with all our cool exhibits. Instead, he got to help us with our annual deep clean and renovations. Here you can see Stanley visiting with Fantasia, our 20-foot-long Burmese Python. She was glad to have a bit of company since it has been so quiet for the past couple of weeks. She even popped her head up from her nap to say, "Ssssalutationsss!"

 

Another big project Stanley helped with was building a new enclosure for our iguanas, Iggy and Elizabeth. Here he is testing the safety net to ensure that Elizabeth won't fall into the pool below. There are just a few more finishing details before the new living quarters are ready for our scaly friends to move in.

You can't make a visit to New York without spending a little time seeing the sights. A lot of times, the easiest way to get around New York City is by taking the subway. Here, Stanley is enjoying a quick bite to eat while on his way to the next exciting destination. He got lucky and had his own seat...often there are so many people on the subway that there's barely even room to stand.

The most exciting site that Stanley got to see was the Statue of Liberty. This year is going to be her 125th birthday. It's hard to believe that the people of France gave her to us more than a century ago! To celebrate, the mayor of New York met with the president of France today at the Statue and wished her a happy birthday. Hopefully, she'll be watching over New York Harbor for many more years to come. Stanley was impressed that he could get such a nice view from the free ferry over to Staten Island. Plus he was happy to head home after such a busy day.

Garage Sales!

So something I discovered when I moved to Staten Island is that they're not really into garage sales here. The selection is paltry, they're often only on Saturdays, and the sales themselves are terribly puny. Back home, you just pick a random weekend and cruise around the right neighborhoods and you can't help hitting half a dozen decent sales. Here, I discovered I had to do my homework, research before I hit the road. Unfortunately, because I work Saturdays, my options have been extremely limited. Since the museum is closed this week, I've been able to switch to a regular person schedule, allowing me a window of two weekends in which to hit all the sales necessary to compose Penny's wardrobe for the next year or two and fill the gaps in my collection for the Passenger. 

I take my garage sale hopping seriously, so I spent the past week

Egret consuming fish it captured

1. inventorying the baby wardrobe to know exactly what I need and what I don't
2. going through the Craigslist listings for the weekend to filter which sales mentioned baby furniture and clothes significantly enough to be worth visiting
3. mapping where each sale was to choose the routes that would likely give the highest payoff with the most stops in a small area
4. pestering my organization to get the petty cash they owe me so I had some shopping money
   

With my map, sale descriptions and Penny in tow, I headed off bright and early Saturday morning. By lunch, we had hit about 5 sales, procuring the better part of her 3T and 4T wardrobe, a toy at each sale (she's too cute for my wallet's good), and a baby picnic table. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch for an hour before heading out again. The last three sales were ok, but not as good as the morning's haul. I had a lot to do Sunday, so figured we'd miss the few Sunday sales I had moved down on the priority list. As Penny and I headed to church on Sunday, though, the mother-lode! There is this lady on that route who has the most amazing yard sales - tables and tables of baby clothes. She must actually go out and round up clothes to sell, unless she has an obscene number of children or a hoarding disorder. In any case, I did some speed shopping - hadn't found any PJs in any other sale, so ransacked her two loaded tables of boys and girls PJs in about 10 minutes before heading over to church. After church, we managed to head back and fill in a couple more holes in the wardrobe with her awesome selection of slightly used or even tags-on deeply discounted clothes. It was great!

After a full weekend of non-stop shopping, though, I figured I owed Penny a bit of actual Mommy and Penny fun. I asked what she wanted to do - she wanted to go on a slide by a lake. Conveniently enough, we were close to Willowbrook Park, complete with duck-filled lake and a nice playset. We stopped to feed some goldfish to the bluegill in the lake, but the ducks were a bit faster than the fish. It seemed the egret was a bit faster than the fish, too, because we saw him successfully stab and eat a fish. After some quality time on the slide, it was getting close to dinner time so we headed back to the car. On the way, we just couldn't resist the carousel. Penny selected "the beautiful horse" and eagerly boarded. It was a bit tough to record her excitement while I held her on and secured our bags, but she was having too good a time to miss the photo opp. She's so much fun to play with. Everything is so exciting, whenever you ask how she's doing, she responds, "Great!" Though she's not an angel by any means, she has a generally good spirit about excitement about exploring the world that's infectious. So we had an awesome weekend, I'm feeling good about how much we accomplished in just a couple of days. Looking forward to maybe spending this Saturday actually relaxing or spending time doing fun things. I do have a Flat Stanley visiting, so I have to find something exciting for him to do.

Brooklyn Bridge Park

 This weekend we met up with our Flats Friends at Brooklyn Bridge Park. If anyone is in the area, this has got to be one of the greatest public parks ever. It has "neighborhoods" of themed play structures. Most of these pics are from the vast Sahara of the sand pit, but there is also a Slide Mountain, Swing Valley, little sprinkler park set up like a stream. Recently, they installed bathrooms (thank goodness!) and a couple of food stands with picnic tables. It's also got a fab view of Manhattan since it's situated under Brooklyn Bridge. In any case, it's sort of midway for all our friends to get together and it's a great area for folks Penny's age. The hardest part is getting there since it's only sort of subway accessible and parking can be a hassle. We headed out early in case traffic was bad and managed to get there a full 30 minutes before we schedule to meet anyone. For someone as serious as Penny is about playing in the sand, this job gets pretty hot and sweaty, even on a cool day like Labor Day was. So we had already moved on to water play by the time our friends joined us.

 A quick wardrobe change and she was ready to roll in the water play area. It is such an awesome setup. The upstairs has a bunch of cool toys for moving the water - Archimedes screw, water wheels, sprayers, etc. - then the water trickles down a fake rocky stream (great for splashing) into this ankle deep pool. They had just enough of the jets turned off so that I could make a semi-dry crossing to the island between the levels for dry (and seated) supervision. Most other adults were soaked or standing at the fences around the area. Penny was having a great time running around - perhaps a little too great, because she had quite a few full body head-on collisions with other kids, all of whom seemed more massive than her. She usually just shrugged it off. But after the second run-in with friend Paul, she decided to sit out for a while. She sat on me, so I spent the rest of our visit trying to dry off.

We had a great time catching up with our friends Paul, Kylan and baby Kaleb (and their mommies and daddies). It seems we're all applying to what seems like a few billion schools all over the country in hopes of getting into at least one good residency program. Seems a bit like a scam when you think about how much they charge you just to apply, but that's the way the system is set up. We'll see how this all goes in the next few months as Dan gets some interviews (hopefully).

If you've wondered why on earth my posting has been so curtailed, it's because I've got one dangerously cute little girl on my hands and some serious mommy fatigue. I mean, look at her, can you really tell her no ALL the time? For example, she is currently going through a Minnie Mouse thing. She just HAS to have Minnie on all her diapers. Darn those diaper folks, they have four different patterns on the diapers in the same box and only two of them have Minnie. So I've had to resort to drawing Minnie onto the remaining half of the diapers. I usually do a day's worth in a sitting. What would I do if Mom hadn't shown me some simple character drawing skills back in the day?! Some of those little hints can be really darned useful when you get down to it. It's nice to know that she can help me be a mom even when she's not here to actively consult every time we hit a challenge.

I apparently haven't been posting quite enough about our new little one recently because I've gotten quite a few inquiries about the little guy (it's a boy month). He's doing quite well. It looks like we'll be getting new pics about monthly for the home stretch here as they're going to be watching us pretty carefully. He's not much of a kicker, but LOVES stretching. I'm constantly having to remind him to stop trying to poke out like the namesake for the movie Alien. Penny likes to have me ask the baby if he can hear her yelling, cleaning, jumping, etc. She'll then shout into my tummy to that effect. He sometimes kicks her in response. Penny's still climbing on me, despite repeated warnings not to hurt the baby. It does seem to be a little less frequent, though. Who knows, maybe she'll come out of this less violent than she had been getting! I obviously enjoy rough-housing a bit too much. Just a little while until Nov. 19. Have to get quite a bit in order still. I have inventoried the wardrobe, so know exactly where the holes are for the next one and have been trying to fill those on and off through garage sales. However, our busy schedule and the dearth of quality garage sales in this area have left some serious gaps still. We'll get there eventually. I've got some hope that folks will be hanging at home this weekend and looking to distract themselves with some garage sale action. We'll see.

Hurricane Irene

It's nice to experience two decent-sized natural disasters in a row and not have much to say about them. The museum decided on Friday afternoon to close for both Saturday and Sunday. That left me plenty of time to prep for the hurricane all day Saturday. We brought in the potted plants, put away everything in the yard, then tied up the trash cans. That didn't last much past noon, so allowed for a nice recovery nap for four hours or so. Penny even joined me briefly, taking the first nap she actually slept for in the previous couple of weeks. Sunday dawned plenty rainy, but without the expected 70-100mph winds I had prepped for. By afternoon, the rain had disappeared, but there were those winds. That meant we stayed indoors pretty much the whole day. Even though we weren't doing much of anything, it was a very tiring day. I tried the same nap move that had worked on Saturday, but apparently Penny just wanted to keep me from napping, not join me.

We seriously lucked out overall. No major wind damage. No basement flooding. We live right across the street from the evacuation center, so we weren't affected by street flooding either. It was perhaps a little disappointing, given the buildup, but I'm all for disappointing. I feel bad for the folks still without power almost a week later. I'm glad we weren't among them because we definitely didn't pack enough food, etc. for any length of power failure. Some lessons learned for next time. Hope everyone else fared reasonably well as well.