Girls Weekend in NYC

This weekend, to celebrate Ali's upcoming milestone birthday, her mom and sister took her up to New York for some shows and dining and miscellaneous good times. Luckily, Poppy stayed behind to help me keep track of the kids. Here we are this morning, playing Ready Set Go. As usual, Jake is in the lead, Sadie is a close second, and Poppy's bringing up the rear. We're getting quite a bit of rain today from tropical storm Hanna, so we decided to head downtown to the Natural History museum for some indoor fun. We had a great time exploring mammals and dinosaurs and insects and PBJ sandwiches.

I think I've got the basic parenting skills down pretty well, at least when it comes to kids waist-high or shorter, but I still have no idea what to do with Sadie's hair. That's exclusively Ali's territory, and when she's not around, this is what Sadie looks like:
There's a hair tie in there somewhere, but I'm not sure what it's doing. Sadie didn't seem to mind. Before we went to the museum, I put a baseball cap on her and she looked like mini college Ali.

Happy Labor Day

We're having a nice relaxing day so far. We made pancakes this morning, and then went on a little hike around Teddy Roosevelt Island. Sadie was in heaven with all the steps to climb on. On our way back home we stopped at the Italian Store and devoured two of their subs. Yum. Here are a couple of pictures from Ali's cell phone, because I forgot the camera. And my wallet. It was that kind of morning...



We rarely use the cell camera, and there were a few shots on there that I'd never uploaded to the computer. This one made me chuckle. This is from a few weeks ago when we all went to the Shenandoah Brewery, and Jake was playing on this rocking horse while I was in the back bottling my beer.


Oh, by the way, if you're interested in Labor related issues on Labor Day, or any other day, check out Robert Reich's blog. He was Clinton's Secretary of Labor and always has interesting things to say.

Quick trip to Philly

Yesterday we drove up to Philadelphia to visit cousins Lyssa and Kevin and assorted other family and friends.  We swam in the pool a little, even though the temp was about 55 degrees.  Here are the kids on boogie boards:

Here's Jake enjoying his root beer:

And here's the whole gang: