Our shiny new home

Breakdown and blast-off

The day before our planned departure on September 1st, our newly beloved Yukon broke down. After a brief trip to get Lulu’s vaccinations and buy new shoes (red Pumas for Sophia and silver Birkenstocks for me)., the car just wouldn’t start. Fears of pointless hours and days of planning crossed our minds, and we joked about an even more extended stay with my parents. But we couldn’t even really think about that. We had to get it fixed ASAP.
We were lucky for three reasons: there was a mechanic a block away, my father was able to jump in the car and rescue us and we gained an extra day to pack. Thank goodness it happened so close to home.

Sadly, it did mean that we had to cut Niagara Falls and Toronto from our itinerary. But we’ll go another time.

So, on the morning of September 2, we departed New Rochelle with a packed-to-the-gills red truck.

Westward-ho!

New York neighborhoods

Our time in New York ended up being just short of six weeks, almost double what we had initially planned. Lucky for us, my parents were gracious hosts who basically let us squat in their house in New Rochelle, a suburb north of New York City in Westchester County. There, our family of four usurped not only their beautiful residence, but also their phone, internet connection and car (and possibly sanity).
Above is a watercolor Daniel did of their home.
Meanwhile, they also looked after Sophia and Lulu while Daniel and I spent inordinate amounts of time researching cars and trailers. The girls love their grandparents.
THANK YOU, Mommy and Daddy.

But New Rochelle was not to be our only abode.
Friends and extended in-laws also threw open their doors to us.

We had several sleepovers at Stephanie and Scott’s grand brownstone in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, one with our hosts and two without them. Fort Greene is a happy mishmash of cultures, where the prevalence of multiracial children reflects a real coexistence I had only really ever seen in northeastern Brazil.
The place looks like Sesame Street, and is filled with beautiful people – many of whom seem to work locally. Minutes after I joked to Stephanie about the area’s resemblance to a photo shoot, we stumbled upon…a photo shoot.

Our second city home-from-home was cat-sitting for our friends Elisa and Eric, who live in the most picturesque pocket of the West Village. This is a block where windows offer the passerby views of rooms large enough to hold chandeliers, tall bookshelves and people who most definitely employ staff. Where gym-honed mothers at the local playground dress in Marc Jacobs, and where six-packs of American beer cost $16. We are not the only ones who appreciate its location…being diagonally opposite the fancy cupcake producing Magnolia Bakery, which featured on Sex in the City, the place is regularly taken over by tour buses and gawking, squawking crowds who take the now defunct show’s storyline very seriously indeed.

Our final Manhattan bolt-hole was a fancy company apartment at the flashy Jade Jagger-designed building called ‘Jade’ in the Flatiron District. The modular studio space gave us plenty of room to sleep, eat and even host a mini-pizza party. (Thanks, Stephie).

And we haven’t even gotten to the kindness shown us by my sister’s husband Steve’s extended family. One aunt-in-law included us on the invite list to a pool party at her and her husband’s mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut. We arrived via taxi from the local train station, to which we returned in a car driven by their butler (yeah, really!). Despite their wealth, they are super down-to-earth people. They even sent us home with a doggy bag (we had to leave early).

An aunt-in-law on the other side of Steve’s family actually loaned my sister, me, Daniel and the kids a house on the North Shore of Long Island. We jumped into the calm waters on the private beach, before retiring to a barbeque overlooking the Long Island Sound and beyond that, Connecticut.

Awesome, all of it.

Lulu update

Baby Lulu is still the calmest infant ever, and we never forget to appreciate her disposition. If she’s hungry, she’ll just suck her thumb. If Sophia’s love gets too rough, she’ll just give me a quiet look that says “Please help me, if you have time”. And when diaper situations turn dire, she’ll just sit there until someone notices.
Today, as she turns four months old, she weighs about 16.5 pounds and her bottom left tooth has poked its way through her poor gums. Apart from growing like crazy, she’s also rolling over and grabbing stuff. So no more leaving her on beds.

My aunt describes her as a baby dropped down from heaven, so calm is she.
That’s not to say that she’s a pushover though…when the girl wants something, she lets us know with high-pitched shrieks that *nearly* rival her sister’s.

She has racked up more gigs than Sophia, though. She’s been to two so far. The first was Scott Hardkiss’ mini launch party for his new album, ‘Technicolor Dreamer’, which by the way is fantastic. So’s the artwork.
Have a look:
http://godwithin.com/site/?cat=3
It’s sold in Best Buy and on iTunes.
She got passed around, then passed out from over-stimulation, then woke up when things got really loud – that’s when we had to go.
The whole family went to the second gig, an outdoor concert featuring Animal Collective in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The kids both enjoyed the lights and music until it went all crazy techno – then we had to go.
She’s been christened ‘Rock-n-roll baby’.

Sophia’s part-Americanization

My sister Annie and her kids, Patrick and Keira, came over most days to play during our time in New York. Together, the kids sang the alphabet song, splashed around naked in the paddling pool and chased my parents’ cats. From her cousins, Sophia learned the joys of American food like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, goldfish, Cheerios and hot dogs. The main thing they learned from her was how to misbehave.
Annie, a special education teacher, has taught us how to incentivize good behavior with a chart - circles to be filled with stickers as reward for doing or not doing certain things, with a grand prize of an ice pop or other small treat once the chart is complete.
Perhaps we could all do well with charts.
Sophia's British accent has started to dull a bit – it started with the words “half” and “tomato”, with American intonation gradually creeping in. After spending the day with her little friend Brecken, whose parents are from Michigan, she started pronouncing some words – like “water” and “four” in a way that actually sounds MORE American than how I speak. Crazy.
The funny thing is she seems to know what’s going on, and often gives me a crafty glance when she’s about to give a word the US treatment.
But then, to ingratiate herself with Daniel, she’ll go back the old way of saying things, tossing him a “harf” or a “bin” to keep him sweet.
That said, she is still a London girl at heart, and misses her mates Rocco and Oriel, and her godfather Chris terribly.

Inhaling culture

Being in New York, we obviously had a lot of Culture to appreciate. We did a good run of museums – The Metropolitan, the whole of which would be very difficult to see; the Natural History Museum, whose dinosaurs and blue whale never cease to amaze (though I do have one question: why does the blue whale look so much smaller once you become an adult?? I swear it used to be three times bigger); the MOMA, which has free entry on Friday afternoons (hooray!) and the Guggenheim, which was unfortunately mainly closed due to the installation of a Kandinsky exhibit.
We also spent a lot of time at Bronx cultural institutions, visiting the Zoo, the Botanical Garden and a Yankees game.
This is the Yankees’ first year in their new stadium, which is across the street from the old one. There seems to be a lot of controversy around the team’s new home – like how is the neighborhood benefiting and why is everything so expensive.
My friend Mike Gartland, a high school classmate who’s now an investigative journalist, is actually examining these questions and others in his documentary ‘In the Shadow of the Stadium’.
http://www.shadowofthestadium.com/
I don’t know much about the situation, but I did notice that the people inside the stadium resembled the people living outside it, that beer cost $11 and that sushi was on sale alongside the hot dogs.
Still, baseball – with its songs, camaraderie amongst the crowd and easy-to-learn rules - is a great representation of everything that’s good about America.

The leaf

Daniel’s birthday present from my parents last March was a weeklong botanical drawing art class at the New York Botanical Garden.
Unfortunately for him, though, when he went to register for the class, he was told that all students had to start with the basic level before moving on to intermediate and advanced courses. Being the mild mannered Englishman that he is, he acquiesced and was probably the only person in the class with an MA from an internationally recognized art school – one the teacher, in fact, had not managed to get into.
She was flexible, though, and let him work on a separate project: a leaf. An amazingly intricate pencil-drawn leaf that was to take over Daniel’s life for that week and beyond. My entire family was obsessed, and each day we waited for him to return from the Bronx with a leaf that had undergone another five hours of detailed artistry.
He gave the original leaf back to the teacher, but kept the drawing for himself. It will reside at my parents for the duration of our roadtrip. (That said, he did try to pack it in the car).