Adventures in NYC

One of our favorite places on earth is New York City. Luckily we have had kids living there for the past seven years.  Noah and Kristi moved there right after graduation from BYU and stayed for five years with an outstanding company called Imagine Learning, which three of our sons now work for.

How we loved those days in Noah and Kristi’s first apartment on the upper east side which was about 200 square feet if you count the loft where we slept with about eighteen inches to spare before our heads hit the ceiling. What good sports they were to share their tiny space with us…and many others until their first baby was born and they decided to move on to a more spacious place….about 450 square feet.

There they stayed through two more babies and a LOT more visitors, including a parade of little mice, who shared it or took over the space while they were gone. They remodeled that run-down, place that had been plastered with the normal hundred coats of paint slopped one layer over the other with no attention to masking windows or baseboard for fifty years and made it into something lovely and creative and lovingly livable. Still, how they survived is beyond me and I’m sure they wondered how they did it when they went back last week for the first time since moving to California two years ago where they added another baby in much more roomy circumstances.

Just before they left another son and his wife moved back to NYC, after having lived there for many years themselves and recently returned from a one year Humanitarian Honeymoon in Mozambique and India (among other places). Tal took over Noah’s job at Imagine Learning and there they were….another great reason to visit that favorite place, along with some of our favorite people!

Last week, we just missed Noah and Kristi who came with two of their children and two associates for the US Open. Sadly we flew in just as they flew out but fortunately we get to see Kristi soon as she is joining us for a cruise. More on that coming soon.

But our “other Eyres” were still there and arranged a lovely place for us to stay because their friends just happened to be out of the country almost the exactly the same time that we were there. People are so kind! They let us stay, sight unseen! We got our exercise because it was a three story walk-up which meant climbing 50 stairs in the sweltering heat of the skinny hallways to get to our front door…but hey…not a big sacrifice!

It was especially fun because Eli and Julie were there from DC for the first couple of days. It was the first time we had seen Julie really looking pregnant since they announced their new first arrival a couple of months ago. For the cutest announcement you will probably ever see of the sex of a new little baby, check it out here.

The US Open was our NYC target. Dad/Rick was, as usual, as excited as a kid in a candy store (except that is a bottle of water and a bag of granola in his arms).

Eli and Julie are great fans! They had been there for several days before we arrived.

We even got our New York Eyres out there…twice!

(Sorry about those closed eyes mom, but that baby is SO cute, I just couldn’t resist.)

We saw the some great matches including the women’s doubles final and Dad and Tal got to see the epic five-setter between Ferrer and that other guy whose name starts with a T.  We were disappointed to miss seeing Federer who was scheduled to play one afternoon we were there because Fish dropped out for health reasons. Look at the “New York hands” on the woman in front of us below….

 

But it wasn’t just all about the U.S. Open!  We had great talks and walks with our New York family and of course, our beautiful baby!  She got her first introduction to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on this day. She loved the Buddha's of the Silk Road Exhibit in a place I’d never been in that stellar museum but I think she liked the bubble blower in the background of this picture even better…

Oh man did we have fun with this girl and her mom!  We walked and talked for miles between museums!  Here she is making friends with everyone on the waiting bench at the Guggenheim…

At the playground

And in her own stomping grounds…her high chair.  What a delightful child!

Dad and I had our share of “stomping grounds” experiences too as we saw two sterling performances on Broadway. Newsies was knock-dead fabulous. Broadway at its finest and Chaplin, the fascinating and heart wrenching story of Charlie Chaplin which is still in reviews but will open officially on Monday. The creativity of Broadway is truly awe-inspiring (usually). 

Incidentally, if you haven’t heard, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints just put an ad in the The Book of Mormon playbill that says, “If you’re going to see the show on Broadway, you should read the book.”  Very well-done. To see it, click here.

Dad spent two days in New Jersey at the Grass Court Tennis Tournament that he enters every year for fun. He had to get up early, travel all the way down from 92nd to 30th street to catch a boat that takes him to the Jersey shore where he gets a cab to the tournament. I went last year and it is pretty “stuffy” there. Whites only. He walked out on the court this year with his Hawaiian shorts over the top of his white tennis shorts and a lady rushed out to say that was “illegal”. He quickly removed the outer layer with a smile.

Sadly the first day, he played the tennis pro on a court that he plays on every day and he lost. Grass court tennis is almost an entirely different game. The second day he went to play a consolation round and got rained out just as they were warming up. So goes life.

The last day, Tal surprised his wife with an overnight trip for their anniversary to see some spectacular outdoor sculpture gardens. We’re not sure where they went but it was a delight to think back to their wild and wonderful wedding and dinner three years ago. Amazingly, it was also Saren and Jared’s anniversary so they celebrated on the same day at our condo at City Creek and about town. That was 13 years ago!  How time flies! 

In the meantime, Dad surprised me with a lunch at Bergdorf-Goodman on the 7th floor on 5th Avenue over looking the Park. Such fun!  Our view was terrific and the food….not quite what we expected but nice. Dad/Rick, in is usual idiosyncratic form ordered deviled eggs.

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While we were waiting for a table, I was watching women casually buying $1300-5000 shoes and thinking that I would never buy anything there if my life depended on it. Meanwhile Dad was off on his own busily buying what he thought was a great idea…two stainless steel settings of some pretty awesome flatware that we could use…just for us… when we’re home alone. This morning when we checked in at the airport, they took the knives away and said we couldn’t take them on board because they had serrated edges. We never check anything so “Hasta la Vista” beautiful knives!  Ahhhhhhh! He, in his normal optimistic form, says the knives weren’t his favorite anyway. He loves the forks and spoons.  

Anyway, that is a pretty fun store to look at!

Their theme for this month inside was bamboo and orchids and the outdoor window displays are always beyond spectacular!

So we’re on an airplane right now flying across the country to Seattle to continue with our two weeks away from home until we return for three days only to be gone for another two weeks. This time we get to have fun with our daughters-in-law on a cruise to Alaska. Details will be coming next. Gosh! Life is so hard!

However, we do write like troopers while we’re on the flights!