Hell's kitchen

We have been feeding the cats in Weehawken while Nick and Zoe are up north for Emily's wedding. They have a nice new apartment around the corner from our old place.

Anyway, we drove out Thursday evening and decided to take the xbox through the Lincoln tunnel and have dinner at our old favorite Ethiopian restaurant in midtown. I felt like a rube in the big city after all this time as a suburbanite, I even had to pay cash at the tunnel, but the old driving skills came back quickly. It's almost hard to believe that Weehawken was home for five years!

Anyway, we enjoyed our meal and Peter was a real good sport. He tried everything but the spiciest dishes and he charmed the socks off the staff.

(I reminded Peter that he now has an Ethiopian cousin whom he will get to meet some day! Any of our friends who also know Magda and Paul in Toronto will be thrilled to know that Yonas is now at home with them. He's just the same age as Peter and looks just as handsome and just as active.)

After dinner we crossed the street to walk through the playground because Peter was so interested in watching the big kids. We watched the kids on the jungle gym and the basketball court, and we saw regular folks (not fund managers and consultants) from every culture you could imagine all taking care of their kids together. It was a great big-city time on a hot night in the middle of August. The kind of thing that makes you think you might like to live in New York after all. Momentarily.

And there was this super cool fountain with jets that sprayed every which way in an inpredictable manner. Peter thought this looked like the coolest thing in the world. I was being a scaredy cat but G reassured me, so we stripped off the boy and let him crawl right in. He had the greatest time chasing the jets and getting sprayed and playing with the big kids. The other kids were so nice and careful with him it was amazing to see. Much more kindness and consideration than I would have expected from kids anywhere.



I got these pics with my camera phone, and we met a photographer who was there with her 19-month old son. She snapped a couple pictures and we might see those some time too, but for now I want to post these lo-fi pictures because it was such a good time for all of us.



Of course that diaper got soaked but I didn't want to expose a naked baby in post-giuliani NYC so I just let him drag it around.



Most everybody was pretty impressed that our little sack of spuds was so game for an adventure. But that's how he is. It makes me happy, despite the down side that all parents will understand.



Of course, at the end of the adventure we discovered that our diaper bag had no fresh diapers in it, but we wrapped him in a towel and he was fine. We bundled back into the Scion and escaped back through the tunnel, past the old neighborhood, and back to suburbia. I carried the sleeping baby upstairs and we all went to sleep together. A good night had by all.