until we meet again, new york

we had great intentions to get up and go every day in new york, but thanks to the east coast time difference, ruby woke up much later than her typical 5:30-6 am wake up time. if you had told me 10 years ago that i would consider 7:30 am sleeping in? i would've laughed at you.

 

on our last day in new york we started off at a great breakfast spot 

that was tucked down a nondescript alley.

 (image from here)
it was so cute inside. loved it. 
it kind of reminded me of a mashup between domino magazine and a hipster's hunting lodge.
our food was super good too.
it was too hipster in there, and i was already getting looks for having a baby (again, a spot where i think babies rarely show up), so i kept my camera stashed in my bag.

(image from here)

we sat right next to this bar, although because it was sunday,
new york's blue laws mean that they can't serve alcohol before noon.
not that i normally imbibe at that time of day,
but a couple of those brunchy adult drinks looked very tasty to this mama!
alas, i settled for a fantastic cappuccino instead.

it was another day of good food and art, so we headed to ps1 to see the greater new york show,
which was a bunch of contemporary work by artist's living in the new york area.
(we took a crazy, circuitous route involving the subway, walking, wandering,
and ultimately a taxi ride)

we sat outside of the cafe for a while enjoying some coffee and the perfect weather.

don't worry, i nursed ruby here too.

ps1 is in a massive old public school building, with art in every room

ruby and i outside of ps1.

art saturated, we hopped on a subway back to manhatten, where i grabbed a sandwich at one of tom colicchio's wichcraft sandwich shops. 

(maybe you know tom from one of my favorite shows...top chef!) 

after my late lunch we walked to greenwich village to meet up with our friend nick to hang out and get a drink before going to an early dinner.

(image from here)

we went to minetta tavern in greenwich village, where i finished off my burger tour of new york with the delicious black label burger. it was delicious, but the experience was less than stellar. first of all, ruby was fussy, hungry, tired and totally being a normal 5 month old in a restaurant that is more suited for people of the adult variety. i tried to take her into the bathroom to nurse or change her, but i swear the it was smaller than our bathroom at home. then there was a super high maintenance woman at the table next to us who was wreaking all of this havoc. 

add in lame waitstaff, and sadly, it wasn't that great. (but our food was good!)

we went home early, walking the streets of new york a final time before our flight the next morning.

even ruby was tired, so she conked out on our flight home (in between being squirrely and nursing)

goodbye for now new york!

we loved you!

xo

a little more new york

...slowly but surely i will finish our fantastic new york trip!

carrying our delightful treats from milk bar, we headed to central park!

we found a cozy spot right inside the park and settled in to have our snack.

matt takes his first bite of cinnamon bun pie. oh yes, you read that right.

ooey, gooey and in pie form.

and here is the aforementioned candy bar pie.

it was so yummy that i included two photos. 

chocolate cookie crust, caramel, peanut butter nougat & pretzel? 

as i may have said before, hello amazingness!

seriously, i savored every single bite and crumb.

it was so peaceful and so relaxing to hang out, talk, 

and just enjoy such a beautiful spot in this vast city.

ruby looks upset, but i promise she was mostly content-

i think she's just said here because she wanted to nurse some more. 

(can i say that this trip could also be called "susannah nurses at every spot in nyc, especially in locations at which young children rarely never set foot")

(see? look how delighted ruby looks just moments later)

we then proceeded to walk about 60 blocks worth of central park for over an hour. it was perfect weather, and so beautiful as we wandered along paths and through different areas of the park.

(image from yelp)

we headed to a spot we've gone before when visiting new york, that our friends brandon, steve & renetta had told us about, the hungarian pastry shop. 

lest you think ALL we did was eat treats, we went to get some cappuccinos. (promise)

although i won't lie- they do have tons of delicious baked goods there (see below.) 

it was jam packed with people studying (it's right by columbia university), pretending to study, waxing philosophical, flirting, reading and hanging out. 

we stayed for a while until ruby was over it and headed to the subway 

(our feet were tired after so much walking!)

(image from myplaceinthecity.com)

my friend rachel & her husband joseph ever so kindly offered to watch ruby for matt & i so that we could go out to dinner sans kidlet. it was so generous and thoughtful of them! we got to stop by their very cute and very new york sized apartment before going out to dinner at the spotted pig (which had just happened to get a michelin star that very week!) it had a new york sized wait of 2 + hours, so we went up to the bar and ate there.

(image from wallpaper.com)

how cute is it? the bar was slammed and such a scene. we did lots of people watching and then matt got the pig eared salad (yes! he did-and i tasted it. it was actually incredible.)

(image from unbreaded.com)

...while i got the burger. (2 burgers in one day! the burger had gotten rave reviews in one of my favorite imported magazines-jamie oliver's magazine. he'd done an article on new york restaurants & included spotted pig's burger. so, i tried it.) it was amazing. yum. yum. yum.

we headed home to rachel's to get ruby (you can see the awesome baby fort she made for ruby to sleep in on her blog) and alas, poor rachel was outside holding a not very happy baby ruby. apparently she didn't want to sleep; instead she wanted to troll the streets of new york looking for new places that i could nurse her. rachel and joseph lived close enough to the apartment we were renting that we took the half hour walk home to soak up some more of the city.

(& more to come as long as you are game for more nyc play by play)

bon voyage

our friends are moving to france for five years.

yay for them and boo for us.

monte, kristy, and...

their two sweet monkeys, sophie and elodie

are leaving the delights of oakland

for this:

i think i would be content sitting on that bench for the next five years, no joke.

meanwhile, our friends nicola, rain, and jair are on a visit to the bay area from england and our friends lydia + anna talked about their honeymoon to tahiti, for goodness sake!

so all of a sudden i am struck with wanderlust, imagining where i would fly away to for a season of life. it isn't happening anytime soon, but it is always fun to dream of possibilities. i've been reading this great book for bookclub about africa, and it made me miss west africa.  i told matt i would love to head back there sometime, especially if i could do work similar to the last time i was there, making drawings for storyboards about health related issues for villagers. not as sexy as the poisse, france. 

it would also be fun to live in italy or france for a year or two. i don't know if i could do it for longer, i might grow too homesick.

pros:

a. way cuter kids clothes

b. good food + good wine

c. culture galore: old buildings, history, art...

d. the possibility of euro-hopping and galavanting from country to country for a weekend trip

e. maybe matt would pick up an accent - you never know...

f. proximity to our european friends: nicola and the girls in england, niki, robyn & chris in the netherlands, bono in ireland

g. little m picking up another language

h. in italy- gelato and cappuccino; in france, wine and crepes

cons:

a. euro-smell (ie the underutilization of deodorant type products) 

b. we would be so poor; "hello, weak dollar; nice to meet you," the euro

c.  far, far away from our sweet ones here

d. the unfortunate practice of women of ALL ages and body types wearing very teeny bikinis + men wearing speedos. tragic.

how about you? where would you head off to?

ah, italy

today was sucky. so rather than dwell on the multiple things that are dragging me down into the depths and making me wallow with sad over the rhine songs on repeat, i thought i'd think back to the stillness and joy of sitting out on the deck over looking the grand canal in venice last fall. sigh. think i'll just sit and remember for a few minutes. wish i could transmogrify myself there, a la old school calvin and hobbes. all i need is a cute outfit, a cardboard box and a whole lotta wishin' and hopin', right?

where would you transport yourself to?

i also heart friends

so, pretty great to have our great friend daphne in town from michigan. as you can see, little m is a fan too.

when i was 12, and we moved from philadelphia to the bay area, i had this brilliant plan to get rid of all of the states between california and pennsylvania. i thought it would work much better for me to keep in touch with friends if those two states were right next to each other and not like 38 states apart. anyway, i'm thinking right now that it wouldn't be so bad if ann arbor and oakland were smack next to each other too. 

points of joy italian style

last year matt and i went to italy for a month (!), stopping in england on our way there to see our dear friends nicola, rain and jair. we flew home one year ago today, so thought a few moments of remembering would be a nice way to close the day. 

a few points of joy from italy:

• eating copious amounts of gelato
• the sound of monks doing the evening vespers in a candle lit stone sanctuary
• learning how to make homemade pasta with fiorella, our italian b & b host
• the italian custom of an evening walk before dinner 
• sitting out on our balcony in cinque terre to read and watch the village below
• felix gonzalez torres at the venice biennale
• rowing a boat around a pond in a park in the middle of rome

road trips + siblings = the best of times/the worst of times

the ruff family went on lots of road trips growing up...from pennsylvania to maine, from california to pennsylvania; we criss crossed the country going north and south, east and west. today i was reminded of all of the glories and headaches of driving long distances with siblings, when matt and i drove with our friends and their 4 year old twins up the california coast. we were in the car probably only 4 hours total, but suddenly i remembered...

• sitting on the vinyl bench seat in the back of our ford fairmont, sans air conditioning and driving over thousands of miles of freeway. since we mostly drove in the summer, my legs stuck to the sticky seats countless times, embossing the seat's braid pattern onto the backs of my thighs. i can still remember that yellow ochre vinyl as if i just drove in that car this afternoon.
• staying up late, talking to my dad while the rest of the car, all of my siblings, plus my mom, slept. once, in ohio, as everyone slept, my mom sat to my right, her jaw dropped open and sound asleep, and my dad sat to my left, driving the car. the two of us had an extremely serious conversation about what i wanted for my twelfth birthday. (some things never change: i think i probably detailed my entire vision for bday # 12 for hours. my dad must have been very patient) one of my wishes was 12 horses, naturally. because why not ask for 12 when you don't even have one. or know how to ride a horse, for that matter. anyway, my dad asked me what qualities i wanted these horses to possess, and apparently i had high hopes for them, as my dad made up a little song just for me and one of my horses. he named one of the horses "oh my" and as we drove past miles of cornfields he sang, "oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my, the singing, swimming horse." sadly, my dream of twelve horses never came true, but it lives on in the oh my melody.
• driving late at night, and arriving at a hotel when it had been dark for hours, only for my dad to get back in the car and say, "sorry kids, we've got to keep driving" so that we'd end up at a hotel with a pool. (we kids required a pool at whatever hotel/motel we stayed at- nothing more, nothing less.) then in the morning we would get a late start- i always thought that it was a completely selfless act on the part of my parents to let us swim all morning, but now that i am an adult and i recognize my dad's love of sleeping in and his tendency to take a while to get ready...i realize that maybe it wasn't 100% altruistic. who cares - we swam, he snoozed; everyone was happy.
• sitting in the middle seat of the fairmont, with jonathan falling asleep on one of my shoulders and rebecca falling asleep on the other. (hmm. it seems a theme is that everyone else slept and i was somehow awake all the time.)
• making up silly car songs with my siblings... um, "north american van lines, we do chicken right?" that's one line of a favorite ditty we invented- i have no idea what that song was about. uh, johnny? bec? any clue?
• racing through parking lots to touch the car first and win shotgun. (so safe to dart about parking lots, i know.)
• fighting over who sat where. and for how long. and making invisible boundary lines in the back seat, and then crossing them. and getting tired, and bored, and cranky. breaking up into sibling cliques for the day (you can do that with 4 kids, you know) and then switching to another favorite sibling the next morning.
• listening to the only music we had in the car over and over: one summer it was the beach boys greatest hits- we listened to that tape on repeat all the way across the southern route of the u.s. i swear, still every time i think of the massively huge state of texas i start humming the tune to "california girls." one trip the soundtrack was mc hammer (awful, right?), and then there was the michael w. smith "go west young man" era. yikes.

ah....so many more memories: all getting the flu in the middle of the midwest, then downing alka selzer in a random supermarket parking lot, the umpteen museums and national parks we went to, panning for gold, picking peas in ohio, dune buggies in michigan, stopping at dairy queen, going to theme restaurants, pulling over at hundreds of rest stops, staying at random people's houses, with cousins, aunts, uncles, and family friends... 

i'm sure i've forgotten most of the specifics, but i know that my parents loved to take us cool places, even if things didn't always go as planned. i also got to see most of this country by the time i was 12 years old, from big cities to little towns and from crappy amusement parks to cultural landmarks. that's a pretty amazing gift to give a child, even if i've forgotten most of the details.

thanks mom and dad. i'm glad you put up with all of our drama to take us on vacation. and thanks for having johnny, bec, and b. i would've been really bored in that back seat all by myself. 

long live the ford fairmont!