Thanksgiving

Despite the fact that Carlos hates NY, we had a really fun thanksgiving weekend there. That said, we did get a classic welcome to NY by getting sideswipped by a taxi about 100 feet after getting through the Lincoln tunnel.  The taxi cut us off and Carlos went after him. A police happened to be close to where his passengers were being dropped so our midnight arrival turned into 1am as the cops processed the incident. The kids all woke up and were so excited about the whole thing they didn't go back to sleep until 2am....

working up a thanksgiving appetite

Thanksgiving day was full of preparations and enjoying the beautiful weather.  With 8 little kids running around it was tough for everyone to sit down at once, but we all enjoyed the meal in rounds. On Friday we went to the big apple circus. Sofia was scared to death and made me stand in the back for much of the time, but overall it was a lot of fun and the kids loved it. Fortunately it's mostly acrobatics instead of animal abuse...

The kids idolize Tio Charlie so they wanted to spend sometime with him alone. We dropped them off and enjoyed a surprisingly quiet brunch with highschool friends.  While the kids adore Tio Charlie they were pretty judgmental of his apartment: "this is SO small," "do you have another house?" "this isn't fancy and the stairway smells!"  Sofia especially loves Tio Charlie - on the car ride home she was fast asleep and started screaming "WHERE IS TIO CHARLIE?????"

On Sunday we went to my aunt Phyllis' mom memorial service. It was a very nice service and so wonderful to see much of the family. Charlie was the only one of my kids who sat through the service and he seemed to think about it a lot because on the car ride home he wanted to talk about it. He also wanted to understand how everyone in the family is connected to us and what it means to be part of the "family" - cousins, aunts, aunts' moms, etc.

Legoland discovery center was close by so we took the kids for one final round of fun before heading home.


The best part of the weekend was seeing how much fun the kids had together. They played every iteration of spy games they could think of. They even gave each other spy tests. I'm going to try and infiltrate to break their code and spy on them next time.

Pretty fun time.