Home again

We are home which means that I now have pictures. I will try to keep the word count under control and add some pictures. First, the picture to the left was of a piece in the modern section of the Met which was basically a parabolic dish made up of tiny mirrors. As I said before there were some pieces that Emmett really liked looking at and this was one. It is worth clicking on the picture to see Emmett zoomed in a little better. If I was a better person I would have noted who the artist was. I am not a better person.

Thursday night we went to dinner with Laura and Lesley to a really good pizza place (so good that we would go back again the next night, this time with Laura, Nick, and Belinda). The picture below at left is of the shopping/walk through Soho on our way to the restaurant with Laura carrying Emmett in the Baby Bjorn. As you can see, Emmett liked hiking around on Laura quite a lot. There were a couple of times that Emmett actually fell asleep in the facing out position (I have pictures to prove it, but will save them for some other time). The picture at right is Laura, Lesley, and Emmett hanging out in the subway.





Friday Emmett and I took it easy before heading to Columbia U to meet up with Belinda and Andrea for lunch before going to the Natural History Museum. The four of us walked through the museum for about an hour before A, B, and E headed back to the hotel for some rest and I walked around the museum imagining what it will be like to take Emmett to a museum like that when he is older and to see his reaction to things like the dinosaur skeleton exhibit.

As mentioned above, Friday night we went back to Soho for pizza. Saturday we moved from the hotel to Chez Lesley and Laura for our last night's stay. Saturday was a pretty slow day with us going to a Mexican restaurant for drinks with Laura (Emmett with margarita to left) and then in the evening Andrea and I had a date night to celebrate the next day's 6-year anniversary. We took the subway to a vegetarian restaurant on the west side where we had a really nice dinner together before walking back to L&L's while Emmett was entertained by two hours of handkerchief-over-Emmett's-face by Laura and Lesley (a game that is quickly rising to nearly 100% laugh effectiveness).

Sunday we were to fly out at 6:20pm from Newark, so Emmett made sure we were all up at around oh-seven-hundred hours to head to Brooklyn to brunch and a flea market. The brunch place was one Lesley knew about and the food was amazing. The flea market was also nice, but was shade-less on a very sunny day, so we shopped only a little before retiring to a nearby park to enjoy some shade (the picture at left is Emmett in my lap looking up while in the park---that is the reason for the funny angle). We went back to L&L's to pack our very heavy bags, said our sad goodbyes, and headed off to the Newark airport.

The trip home started out rough. We knew that we had bags that were teetering on the edge of the allowable limit (< 50 lbs is free, 51+ pounds is 100 dollars). So at the airport we each started checking in only to find that the airline was under the impression that Andrea did not actually fly out on our flight to NY and therefore should not be allowed to fly back. While she straightened this out I checked in and weighed my bag only to find it was 55 pounds. So we juggled Emmett, the transaction that was taking place to figure out how to allow Andrea onto the plane, and me trying to empty 5 pounds of things from the bag. I took out some books and other things and re-weighed only to find out that I had only taken 2.5 pounds off, but as I started to take the bag off of the scale once again a nice United worker witnessing our struggle said that they would allow us a 52.5 pound bag at no charge "as a courtesy from United Airlines." They allowed Andrea a ticket finally and we headed off to security to wait for our plane that was now expected to be 20 minutes late boarding.

I didn't mention it when discussing our trip out to NY as I thought it was normal practice, but we were allowed to board early as we were traveling with an infant. Well, it ends up that the treatment we received on the way out was "a courtesy of United" in SF and we would not receive such treatment on this flight. As the flight was boarding (now at 6:50 or so when the flight was scheduled to leave at 6:20) Emmett was resting in the Ergo on me and we noticed that I had a section 2 boarding pass and andrea a 4 (even though we were in adjacent seats) so I could board long before her. We decided to make the best of this and I took the bags (small) that would be going in the overhead as well as the resting Emmett. However, according to the airline Emmett was traveling with Andrea and not me, so even though he was asleep on me he had to board with Andrea. Finally as a "courtesy" they allowed Andrea to board ahead of her group so that the computer would allow Emmett on the plane.

It was a little warm and sticky on the plane on the tarmac, and the pilot came on to let us know that there were some 60 planes ahead of us to take off so we would be on the ground another 60-90 minutes. Emmett was a pretty good sport through this, but about an hour in (and with only 20 planes ahead of us) the pilot announced that a computer module had crashed and they would have to go back to the gate to fix it. Once back at the gate people started milling around and Emmett, having been good for an hour-plus decided to really cry. People were annoyed, but the whole problem was that we couldn't stand up and move him around (which would cure his unhappiness most likely) because people were blocking all of the aisles, so Emmett cried and cried and cried. Finally after what seemed like 20 minutes we stripped off all of his clothes , he stopped crying, and was all smiles [ed. by Andrea: cried closer to an hour, stripped down the whole time, stopped crying suddenly and was all smiles when layed on his back on the pillow]. It was the strangest thing, though in hindsight we should have noticed he was getting warm. We had a pillow for him to lay on in our laps and he continued to be in a great mood and, at some point, the pilot announced that we would be back on track for taking off soon. As we made our way to the runway, Emmett got sleepy and fell asleep unswaddled and nearly-naked in our laps, missing the take-off that happened three hours after we had boarded the plane. Emmett stayed asleep the entire flight to SF (5.5 hours or so) and never once complained. Our bags arrived quickly (not as a "courtesy", just because of luck), and we were all home in bed by 2:30 SF time...5 hours after we were to have landed originally.

Today was clean-up day, which was mostly taken care of by Andrea while I was at work, and this afternoon we had Emmett's four-month appointment. Everything went well and he got repeats of the DTaP and HiB shots. He cried when they happened, but immediately after was happy without even feeding. Pretty tough cookie we've got. Now they are in bed and I am going too so that we can get back on west coast time.