Quick Hits: NYC School Vacation Trip, Occupy Siblings & Margarita Bombs

NYC School Vacation Trip
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Intrepid. The United Nations. Top of the Rock. Wicked. Skating at Rockefeller Center. Zabar's. A nod to Linsanity.

The Picket Fence Post family headed down to the big city for a few days at the beginning of February vacation and, as was The Spouse's wont, packed so many activities into our brief three-day/two-night stay that I've been rendered exhausted for the remainder of the week as The Youngest Boy keeps bugging about where I'm going to take him next. (Copious amounts of coffee are not perking me up any.)

We packed ourselves into one hotel room -- seriously, New York City hotel rooms are so expensive that we couldn't justify getting two rooms, but at least The Girl got her own bed -- and we were able to make great use of my iPad (I got to watch episodes of Downton Abbey, my new addiction, in bed while the kids slept) in between dragging ourselves all over Manhattan and squeezing in a cat nap at a Starbucks at Rockefeller Center. (No lie. I was so tired at one point I had a very small nap while sitting in a Starbucks. After a latte nonetheless.)

The Girl loved visiting The Met with me, while the boys, or at least one of them, enjoyed going to the Intrepid with their father. (The disgruntled child kept texting me saying he was having a crappy time and wanted me to take a cab across town and rescue him from the horror of touring the museum with his father and brother.) Despite the complaints of that one child, it's a good thing we decided to split up and that I didn't take The Youngest Boy with us to the museum because, while he appalled by the paintings of naked people at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts when we went there several months ago, he would've been downright outraged at the plethora of naked sculptures throughout the Met. Really graphic sculptures too. (Every time we've tried to tell the child that it's art and that the human body is beautiful, he tells The Spouse and me that we're sick perverts.)

My two highlights from the trip: Seeing the Broadway show Wicked (which I didn't think I'd like because it's a musical and I'm not keen on musicals, but I wound up loving it . . . in fact everyone in the Picket Fence Post family enjoyed it, which is rare to achieve a consensus) and ice skating at Rockefeller Center even though I fell down on the ice twice, the second time landing really hard on my rear-end. It still hurts, days later. (Insert pain in the butt joke here.)

We tried, and failed, to get tickets to see Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' new basketball sensation, play at Madison Square Garden. I was told, in no uncertain terms by the two different ticket agents with whom I spoke on the phone, as well as by the Knicks/Ticketmaster web site, that it was "impossible" for me to buy tickets for all five members of my family. Losers. However we still got a taste of Linsanity by stopping by at the NBA store and getting The Eldest Boy one of the Lin T-shirts that the clerk with whom I spoke said is flying off the shelves. (My personal favorite souvenir from the trip: The "Knope 2012" T-shirt from the NBC Experience store honoring Amy Poehler's lead character Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation.)

On our way out of town, we stopped at Zabar's, the famous NYC deli/grocery store, and bought the most delicious baked goods I've ever tasted. The chocolate babka -- a shout-out to Seinfeld -- was delectable and the knishes were fabulous. It's a good thing that I don't live near Zabar's or else that fanny upon which I fell at the ice skating rink would most certainly balloon if I scarfed down those choice eats on a regular basis.

Occupy Siblings

Perhaps I've shared one too many news casts and newspaper front pages with the Picket Fence Post kids about Occupy Wall Street because after we got home from our trip, The Youngest Boy decided to stage a sit-in in front of his sister's bedroom door, complete with a little tent, an Occupy Siblings protest if you will.

Why was the little person protesting? Not because there's a 1 percent versus the 99 percent thing going on in our household -- though if you asked The Eldest Boy he'd say The Spouse and I are top-hatted, walking stick-carrying snotty 1 percenters while the kids are the powerless 99 percenters whose only option to make change is to protest -- but because he believes his sister is hoarding a bunch of notebooks and he wants her to share the wealth.

"Do you want to join the protest for notebooks?" he asked his brother, who declined as he was playing the role of the counter-protester taunting the Occupier, only he didn't have a snarky sign with him.

The ironic thing: I'm 100 percent certain that if I went to The Youngest Boy's Superfund Site of a bedroom I'd find 12 notebooks buried under various piles of garbage.

Margarita Bombs

The best line of the week came from The Youngest Boy who was telling his brother a story while we were driving home from New York, "And then the guy threw a margarita bomb!"

He meant Molotov cocktail.

Image credit: Photos of NYC by The Girl, photo of Knope shirt, NBC.

Notes from a 9-Day Canadian Odyssey

Family vacations can be memory-making and fun, but they're double-edged swords, which can leave you with the distinct feeling that what you really need after the family vacation concludes is a RELAXING one, particularly after traveling 1,100 miles in the car with three kids.

It had been four years since The Spouse and I had taken a long road trip with the Picket Fence Post kids. The last time was when we went to New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. The Spouse thought we were clearly due so he planned a road trip to Montreal and Quebec City with a one-night stop in North Conway, New Hampshire to break up the ride home.

Thus we took off -- armed with a borrowed portable DVD player for the car and a bunch of used DVDs – and headed for the land where more people speak French than English. And let me tell ya, the four years of French The Spouse took in high school . . . totally useless. I'd taken Spanish in high school and, while I brought a couple of English/French books with me and tried to remember some key phrases, every time I was face-to-face with a French speaker, Spanish words started involuntarily popping up in my mind and I had to stop and fumble around in my brain for the right word. Most of the time I wound up just smiling mutely like some kind of idiot.

By the end of the trip, the three kids were comfortable saying, “hello,” “please” and “thank you,” as well as saying in French that they didn’t know how to speak French, how to ask someone if they spoke English and how to inquire where the toilet was located.

What they weren’t comfortable with was eating cuisine that didn't resemble American "kid fare." Every night, after a long day of traipsing around Canadian landmarks (La Citadelle, the Quebec parliament building, Old Quebec City, Parc Olympique, the botanical gardens in Montreal), we’d face the evening battle royal over where to go for dinner and what to eat when we got there. The Spouse and I only made them have one “fancy” meal where we all were served soup, salad, steaks and “frites.” Two out of the three Picket Fence Post kids were miserable all the way through the dinner, which, I will admit, we were having at a later hour than the kids were used to, contributing to their ire. On most other evenings, it felt like a Herculean struggle to try to lobby them to eat anything other than pizza, a hamburger/cheeseburger, some version of chicken fingers or pasta with "red sauce." On the side.

Not to mention that there were all these little fights that, by the end of the week, had picked away at my patience until there was nothing at all left. It was the non-stop bickering over the small stuff that really got to me, like who got to push the hotel elevator buttons, who got to open the hotel door with the cool key card, who went first on the escalator, who had to sit in the middle seat in the car, who "crossed the invisible line" in the car, why there weren't better snacks in the car, who got to sit next to The Spouse at meals, who got to sleep on the cot and who had to share the other bed with a sibling, especially The Youngest Boy who was apt to roll all around the bed.

I think the stress had started taking a toll by the time we got to the Citadelle for a tour and to witness the changing of the guard ceremony. The soldiers were all decked out in red uniforms and the black English hats (they're dressed like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace). During the ceremony, they marched around the parade area, submitted to an inspection by a superior, guards in the band played some music and one soldier brought out this ceremonial goat named Batisse, the latest in a long line of regimental goats. As we stood there in the hot sun and kept telling our 9-year-old to chill out and stop bellyaching, I started feeling punchy, so I started making whispered inappropriate jokes including telling the kids that after the guard members who were going off duty were inspected, the least prepared soldier would get shot in the knee as punishment. Terrible, I know, but what can I say, I was tired and cranky. The Spouse, appealled, set the kids straight – “No one’s getting shot!” – nonetheless, the children kept giving me sidelong glances as if they weren’t too sure about how this ceremony was going to conclude. (Fear not, there was no bloodshed.)

On the vacation’s lone rainy day, we went to the aquarium near Quebec City and saw some cool walruses and a whole mess of really ugly fish, then headed in the direction of this insane indoor amusement park at a shopping mall called MegaParc. Only problem was, the directions we’d received from our hotel's concierge didn’t happen to mention that there was a detour along the route. Said detour – the detour signs led us nowhere -- had us lost for quite some time as we kept circling around and around. The directions and crude map drawn by a French-only speaking clerk at a random store we'd passed were moderately helpful, while the offspring kept reminding us that they were hungry (I plied them with Jolly Rancher candies), that they needed to use the toilet and were sick of being in the car. I was with ‘em. On all three counts. Eventually, we found the place and man, was it loud in there what with an indoor Ferris wheel, roller coaster, bumper cars (which I feared would put my back out as the impact of hitting another object was so intense), spinning rides, rock climbing, a carousel, etc.

Amusing moments:

-- The kids telling us after our first historic tour that they were all done with this tour business. When The Spouse told ‘em they might very well learn something from the tours, he was informed that it was summer and summer was no time for learnin’ stuff.

-- Everyone was greatly amused that when you muted the TV in our Quebec it said, “Silence” on the TV screen.

-- When we arrived at one particular hotel we decided to be cheapskates and parked our own vehicle in the parking garage, lugging our stuff from the garage to the front desk. The route took us up and down seven flights of stairs -- the kids' luggage loudly slamming against the stairs -- and to an ancient, potentially killer elevator that nearly closed on The Youngest Boy, clipped his shirt sleeve a bit. Okay, so that’s not funny, exactly, but we joked about it during our hours on the road, that and getting shot in the knee for being ill-prepared the changing of the guard ceremony.

Now we're back and on the precipice of a new school year. Hockey practice starts for The Youngest Boy this week -- all of our first forays into playing on a hockey team (pray for me to locate my patience) -- and we still have to go back-to-school shopping and tackle that supply list. Our Canadian odyssey already seems like it was a long time ago.