Vintage Ellie

I was flipping through pictures in Eric's iPhoto the other day and came across the series of shots he took in order to get a nice portrait for Ellie's birth announcement. This set never made it onto my computer, so I wasn't familiar with the whole series, only our chosen photo. I loved looking back through these newly-found pictures of my sweet baby girl at only one week old. Is it even possible that she was really once that tiny?!

But this one picture in particular...oh, this picture. It made me laugh out loud and feel so full of love.

What a sweet, silly, squishy-cheeked little peanut. Oh, my Ellie!

Great Grandma L.

One of our top priorities before leaving New York City was to get Ellie out to Denville, NJ to meet her Great Grandma L., Eric's paternal grandmother. Ellie is lucky enough to have four great-grandparents in her life, and Great Grandma L. was the only one she had yet to meet. We made plans to head out to her place the Saturday following Thanksgiving, and Eric's Uncle Alan, Aunt Lynn and cousin Kristen met us there for lunch. It was so great to introduce Ellie to this branch of her family tree!

We took the train from Hoboken, and Ellie did surprisingly well despite being a bit tired. She even passed some time by biting my face, although I prefer to interpret it as kissing.

My loves waiting in the Hoboken Train Station

Off to Denville!

Chomp!

When we arrived in Denville, Uncle Alan retrieved us from the train station and took us to Grandma L.'s place. As we walked through the halls of her building, all the residents were preparing to head off to lunch so everyone was out and about. This allowed for much showing-off of the great-grandbaby, and everyone just ooh-ed and aaah-ed over little Ellie. She was quite a sensation, and I think her Great Grandma was very proud!

Eric, Ellie and Great Grandma L.

We had a lovely lunch and a great visit with everyone. They all seemed to love Ellie (but really, how could they not?) and she was really on her best behavior all afternoon. She just happily ate her Puffs (God bless the inventor of Puffs) and gnoshed on some banana in her mesh feeder while we dined and talked. Then she made the rounds and was held by all the women, and it was so nice to see her bonding with more new family members.

Four generations! (Uncle Alan is standing in for Eric's dad, of course.)

Aunt Lynn, Kristen, Ellie and me

Ellie and her Great Aunt Lynn

Kristen was accessorized to Ellie's liking

Kristen was kind enough to give us a ride back to Hoboken at the end of our visit, which was much appreciated. Ellie was so sleepy by then, and she did manage to pass out in the car for a bit, but awoke with a vengeance just as we arrived in Hoboken and then fully melted down. We were very grateful not to have had that happen on a long train trip! Thanks, Kristen!

It's probably a bad sign if she's pouting while sleeping.

It was such a nice visit with the NJ W. family. Hope to see you all again soon!

Ellie's First Thanksgiving

See how I wanted to title this post, "Our Last NYC Thanksgiving," but I decided instead that "Ellie's First Thanksgiving" was more positive? Progress!

We had a really wonderful Thanksgiving. We started our festivities the day before, actually. I had a massage gift card I had to use up before we left town (oh shucks, oh darn), so on Wednesday afternoon I took advantage of a little pampering. When I was finished, Ellie and Eric met me on Fifth Avenue and we walked up to Central Park for a bit of a lovely fall stroll.

On the Mall in Central Park

Strawberry Fields

Hanging out in the park with a pretty girl

Those pictures of Ellie and me were taken under the same tree where Eric took my picture almost exactly a year ago, when I was sporting a bit of a baby bump, just after we had found out that our baby would be a girl. What a change in our lives in just one year!

I'm thankful for that baby belly, and even more so for the little sweetheart taking its place this year!

From there we walked north to the Natural History Museum, where they inflate the balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. We went to this our first Thanksgiving in New York, although much later in the evening when the crowds were much worse. This time, it was crowded, but not terrible. We were able to get up close to the balloons for pictures when we wanted, and I was surprised how much they had already been inflated. We only checked out half the balloons, because a certain somebody was sleepy, but it was still a lot of fun and something I'm glad we made it a point to do one more time before we left the city.

Eric and Ellie ready to see some parade balloons

Line of balloons being inflated

Eric, Ellie and Uncle Sam

Kermit face plant

Happy Thanksgiving?

At the end (for us) of the balloons

On Thanksgiving proper, we started the day by watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. That was the only bummer of the whole holiday, actually. The parade changed its route this year, and marched down Sixth Avenue...right past Eric's office. In fact, if you watched the CBS coverage of the parade, they were actually broadcasting from right in front of Eric's building (he worked in the CBS building, so this makes sense). We had planned to go into the city to watch the parade from his office, for a great view from above. Unfortunately, as I mentioned yesterday, the trains are still a mess after Hurricane Sandy and the ferries weren't running on Thanksgiving, so we really had no feasible way to get into the city. So, no live parade for us. 

We did enjoy watching it on TV though, and it was a nice, leisurely morning also filled with pie-making, Skyping with family, and napping (for the wee one, of course).

Look, guys! SANTA!

Enjoying our Thanksgiving morning!

(Ellie is SO EXCITED OMG that Achilles is that close to her!)

That afternoon, we went over to the home of our friends Jess, Eric and Ada for dinner. They ended up staying in town unexpectedly, so we all got together and ordered a pre-cooked dinner, which we supplemented with our own side dishes and dessert. It gave us plenty of time to visit with each other, for the girls to play, and for us to enjoy a delicious meal.

Ellie and Ada, clearly shocked about something.

Oh, hi there, girls.

Ellie was really working on her "pulling up" skill

Time to eat!

Our wonderful hosts

Ready for our Thanksgiving meal!

I even made Ellie her own pureed Thanksgiving dinner ahead of time: roasted chicken, sweet potatoes and peas. She also had pumpkin with a little cinnamon in place of pumpkin pie. Fancy!

Her first Thanksgiving dinner!

We stayed and hung out a while until the little ones really started to grow weary, and then we called it a day. Back at home, Achilles got a little Thanksgiving treat, too, then Eric and I relaxed with some wine, cheese and crackers to finish out the evening. All in all, it was a perfect last Thanksgiving in New York.

Thanksgiving skyline

Adjusting

Well my friends, we are in Florida. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind and the craziness hasn't slowed down just yet. We just have a lot going on.

We spent our last couple of weeks in New York doing as much sightseeing as we possibly could, and I'll be telling you all about that starting this week. Of course, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, this required much more effort on our part than it should have, because the Hoboken PATH train station is still inoperative. That meant that every time we wanted to go into the city we had two options: 1) walk over a mile and a half to the next nearest train station, or 2) hope our timing worked out to take the rush hour ferry from Hoboken (offered only between 8:00-10:00 a.m. and 4:00-8:00 p.m.) for $10 roundtrip. Our timing almost never worked out for the ferry, so I guess you could say we got our exercise that week. But, we were devoted New York sightsee-ers, so it had to be done.

To add to all the craziness, I accepted some jury work during our last week and Ellie started teething. As for me, the work was much appreciated but the timing was obviously less than desirable. As for Ellie, let's just say she hasn't exactly been handling this growing teeth thing gracefully. The poor thing has been miserable. She decided to sprout her bottom two teeth at once and it has not been a fun time for anyone involved.

Poor Ellie is showing you where it hurts.

Is she not just the most dramatic little thing?

We also spent a lot of time packing, obviously. Poor Eric turned 30 years old with no fanfare, not even so much as a dinner out (not on his birthday proper, anyway, but we did have some final Grimaldi's with friends the following day, which was nice!). Instead, we packed from about 7:00 in the morning until 10:30 at night on his birthday. Happy birthday to Eric! We did, however, celebrate a bit the night before, after his last day of work. His firm threw him a going away party and gifted him an autographed David Price baseball, and then back at home we drank some champagne and reflected on both his 20s and his time at the firm ending on he same day. It's time for a fresh start.

Eric in his now-empty office for the last time!

But when we weren't sightseeing, or dealing with devil teeth, or working, we were creating this mound of boxes...

Ugh. This used to be our dining room.

...with a few others scattered around, too. Basically, we could barely walk through the apartment and we gave up letting Ellie play on the floor at all because, well, what floor?!

More ugh.

We also made Achilles a bit nervous.

"Take me with you, guys? Please?"

The movers came for our belongings on Monday, December 3rd. They showed up 20 minutes early, which would have been great had we been ready, but what can you do? (Seriously, when are people ever early?) They got right to work clearing the boxes out of our apartment.

Ellie amongst the boxes

Our stuff moved out into the hallway, ready for a trip down the elevator and onto the moving truck

Eric and Achilles hung out in the kitchen to stay out of the way, but Ellie and I got clear out of town and went into the city for some shopping at Bryant Park and a visit to my old office.

Sweet girl out on the town

We returned to a very empty apartment.

Well that's just sad.

Eric had already made a little temporary "home" for us, including a "living room" of terribly uncomfortable folding chairs and a stepstool coffee table, and a bedroom outfitted with Ellie's Pack 'N Play, and a bed for us made of old memory foam and cheap blankets. Luxury!

The kids were excited to have lots of room to move, at least, and Ellie immediately took to chasing Achilles around the living room.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

We had planned to spend Tuesday cleaning, but given the fact that I had work to do and we wanted to be able to go into the city on our last night, we decided to splurge on a cleaning service. It was much more reasonably priced than we expected, and the hours of scrubbing it saved us were priceless. Best decision ever. (I'll tell you more about our last day in the city a bit later.)

Wednesday, December 5th was officially Leaving Day, and it was a whirlwind. We had a lot of trouble returning our cable box, which kept poor Eric occupied most of the morning while I finished up packing everything we would be flying home with us. Then I took the kids for a nice long walk around Hoboken, in the hopes of getting Ellie an extra nap in the carrier and tiring out Achilles before our flight. (For the record, Ellie did nap and Achilles just does not tire.) We walked our usual loop around the waterfront, up through the Stevens Campus to Castle Point, down and over to Washington Street and back to our apartment. It was a nice way to say goodbye to Hoboken and that beautiful city across the river.

Farewell, Hoboken

Farewell, you beautiful skyline

Meanwhile, Eric did the move-out walk-through with maintenance, brought down our luggage and loaded it into the car service van that we took to the airport.

We travel light, right?

We got to the airport and through security really with no troubles at all, which was quite a feat considering we had to check three bags and a car seat, then get through security with three laptops in tow, a baby and a dog. But we did it and even had a few minutes to grab a quick lunch at our gate and enjoy our very last New York Celebrity Sighting: Gilbert Gottfried was on our flight! What a way to end it all, am I right?

The flight itself was...well, it could have been worse, although Jason Segel's "THIS IS MY NIGHTMARE!" line from I Love You, Man kept running through my head on repeat. Ellie started off the flight fine:

She's excited to get to Florida!

But at the end of the day, a flight with a teething, overtired, squirmy baby is just not going to be a good time. I nursed her a lot just because every so often she would lose her mind and that was the only way to calm her. Well, that and Puffs. The girl loves her some Puffs. We ate Puffs for like an hour and a half straight.

This is me praying she'll fall asleep like this for a bit. Spoiler alert: she won't. Don't be crazy.

She also enjoyed looking out the window for a few brief moments.

Checking out the clouds

We were lucky that nobody had booked the middle seat in our row, so we had all three seats to spread out. Thank goodness, because Ellie spent an awful lot of time climbing back and forth between us in that empty seat. Had we been crammed into two seats, it would have been that much worse.

As for Achilles, well, he didn't bark for the entire three hours, so by comparison to past flights with him, it was a success. He did whine for most of it though, sometimes louder than others, and there was some occasional barking. Suffice it to say, our neighbors were not our biggest fans.

Ellie laughing at Achilles on the plane

But we made it, and so did all of our luggage. My dad picked us up at the airport and brought us back to his house, our new home for the next few months, and Ellie promptly crashed. Well, until we actually put her in bed. And then she screamed. And then got up and played. And then she crashed again.

Plumb tuckered out

Since our arrival in the Sunshine State, we've been quite busy. We have been working on getting driver licenses and car registration squared away (we got a car from my grandma). I've been working. Eric has started working. We've been visiting friends and family as much as we can manage.

And, we've just been trying to adjust. It's strange being back. I knew the weather would be warmer here, but I wasn't prepared for it to be as warm as it is. We're getting used to driving everywhere again. We went to the grocery store and were so shocked and the comparatively low prices (to NYC) that we bought pretty much everything. It has all been a bit weird.

The weirdest part, though, are those moments when we remember that we're not going back. Because our belongings haven't arrived yet (hopefully they'll be here by Saturday), it still just feels like we're visiting. And when we actually left, there was so much craziness going on with juggling all our luggage, and handling the baby and the dog, that we really couldn't even take a second to reflect on the fact that we were really leaving. In a way that was good, because I would have just been too sad if I had been able to really be present in the moment and dwelling on what was happening as that plane took off. But now, every now and then, it will hit me. A silly example: we bought ice cream at the grocery store. I thought, "oh, we should be sure to hurry up and finish the ice cream before we go back home." And then I remembered, nope, this is home now. It's not just vacation. While it is so nice to be back with our families, I still just can't really let myself think about that too much or else I get pretty bummed. I know that will fade in time but for now, it's just too fresh.

So, we'll just keep focusing on settling in and getting adjusted. Ellie loves having a big house to crawl around and explore, and Achilles is beside himself with all the squirrels to chase in the big back yard. When our stuff arrives, hopefully having our own furniture will help us feel a bit more settled, and once the holidays pass we should be able to get into a good routine. The next few weeks will continue to be crazy, but I'm sure we'll get there.

In the meantime, I'll be sharing all the fun of our last weeks in New York with you. We really lived it up the best we could in our final days and we loved every second of it. I can't wait to tell you all about it!