All In A Days Work...

My friend Melissa had a few passes to go to Kidville for open gym time and asked this crew to join her and Jonah. It was a great chance for us to do something new and different, so of course we agreed to go! Since the gym wasn't available until noon and we had to travel to the Upper East Side to get there, we decided to head over to their apartment first to play a little, eat lunch, then go to the gym. Might as well make a whole morning/early afternoon out of it!

Sounds easy enough right?

I live in Harlem. The west side of Harlem. Melissa lives in the Upper East Side. According to google maps we live 3.7 miles from each other. Because I don't want to pay for a cab and I can't take the bus (we'll I can, but you have to fold your stroller, which means removing my kids, taking everything out of the basket underneath, removing the kick stand Jack rides on, folding it up, all while expecting my little ones to stay still on the sidewalk, get on the bus and then do it all again in reverse once we get off the bus... now you know why I choose not to :) ), so the train and walking are our only choices. It took me a little over an hour to get to her apartment and a little longer to get back.

Here's our journey!

We got on the 1 train and took it down to 96th St. Got off and headed 3 blocks to Central Park and proceeded to walk across the park to 5th Ave. It's been an beautiful day here today and really the walk across the park was nice, except I didn't take the best route and found my self on tiny gravel paths or off- roading it in the grass a good bit of the time. Not ideal! Jack walked the entire way across the park. He loves Central Park! He found 2 huge sticks right away and drug them all the way to the East Side. A side note, when we got to 5th Ave. we walked past a play ground and a kid had on the same shirt as Jack and Jack looked at me and said "Hey, look at that boys shirt. It's like mine. We're brothers! I didn't know that!"

I secretly wanted to leave the kids and just go play tennis for a few hours

Jack drug his sticks up the rock. He said he had a job to take care of.

Off-Roading

It felt a little sentimental to me being at the corner of 96th and 5th Ave. because almost 2 years ago I spent 12 straight days taking the bus to that exact location and walking up to Mt. Sinai Hospital to spend the day there with Lillie and Elliott while they were in the NICU.

96th St. and 5th Ave.

This is the Starbucks I spent a lot of time in between feeding babies. Just needing to be out of the hospital every now and then since I was spending 12 hours a day there.

We then made our way over to Melissa's. Much to Jack's delight, there was a blow up haunted house in the lobby of their apartment. He thought it was so cool!

After lunch we headed to Kidville. The kids had a great time playing and jumping around. It was fun.

At last it was time to go home. This was the first time I'd gone to the Upper East Side alone with the kids, so I thought I'd try a different route back, just to see if there was another option. So we took the 4 train up to Yankee Stadium, transferred to the D and got off at 145th St. There were 3 long, steep flights of stairs from the D train to the street. And then we were still a ways away from home. 2 avenues and 10 blocks. The walk is not bad, if you were alone. Pushing 3 kids... not recommended. I have no pictures of this part of the adventure. I was too worn out!

Anyway, we made it home. The kids all went straight to bed and are just now waking up. 3 more hours till the twins bedtime! I hope we can make it ;)