We started it off right with a date night. Kevin and I had a delicious dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Murray Hill (aka: Curry Hill due to its high volume of Indian restaurants) and then met up with partiers Katharine and Paul at the same jazz club we took the kids to last weekend, Jazz Standard. This time we shared a bottle of Champagne and listened to a fantastic trio. It was so nice to have some grown-up time.
Saturday started off as usual, Kevin and Ella off to soccer while Holden and I went to parent/child yoga.
Holden on top of the triple plank pose
But first we tested Cousin Bonnie's recommended Oatmeal Hotcakes recipe and oh man....were they a hit. Try them for yourselves. Relatively healthy and so delicious. Luckily I doubled the batch and was able to stick Sunday morning's breakfast in the freezer.
Once we were nice and limber we met up with Kevin and Ella and headed back to the Lower East Side to the theater we went to several months ago that performs children's theater in Spanish. We saw a play based on a book that Ella's class just read called La Cucarachita Martina.
Big, big hit. They did a great job of combining live actors with several types of puppetry. And it's a very small theater, so there are never any bad seats.
As long as we were in the LES we decided we should hit the world famous Momofuko, famed for its ramen. It did not disappoint and was worth waiting in the line snaked around the block for 40 minutes.
Sunday morning, after eating leftover pancakes (just as good the next day), the kids and I headed off to Holden's T-Ball game while Kevin had minor surgery to remove recurrent skin cancer off of his nose. People, I tried to get a picture of him with his cute bandage across his nose but he threatened divorce. I tried.
This was my view from my camping chair at Little League. St. John the Divine.
The three of us hopped a taxi over to the East Side after the game and went digging for ancient treasures, of course. Because going on an archeological dig on a Sunday afternoon is the kind of thing you can do when you live in the coolest city on the planet.
The dig is actually a recurring Sunday afternoon activity available at The Jewish Museum.
The museum is housed in one of the oldest mansions in Manhattan, a beautiful space. When we arrived there was already a fairly long line. I figured it wasn't for the dig. Turns out we were also treated to a Marc Chagall exhibit (I got yelled at when I tried to take a photo) and an Art Spiegelman exhibit, which Holden liked because Spiegelman is an acclaimed graphic artist (as in comic books). I was sorry Kevin wasn't with us because he recently read Spiegelman's book Maus.
We had a bonus day together with Veteran's Day today. Unfortunately, Veteran's Day is one of those "holidays" that Kevin doesn't get off work. The kids and I enjoyed a production of the Shakespeare play As You Like It put on by local homeschoolers.
The homeschooling community in New York City is pretty amazing. It's not what we've been taught to believe homeschooling to be. I was able to chat with a few moms and it turns out there are thousands of homeschoolers in the city and most don't do it for religious reasons but rather because of the poor state of the public schools, especially with all of the recent changes with the Common Core Standards. And the city is such a wealth of education with many opportunities for children to take classes from history museums, science museums and art museums and local experts and artists. Even the Center for Architecture and the New York Historical Society offer classes for homeschooled children.
I was impressed at how well my kids endured the two hour, no intermission Shakespeare play. About 20 minutes into it I thought for sure the kids would start getting bored and distracted and want to leave. Quite the opposite. To my surprise, they stayed glued to the stage the entire time even though they didn't understand everything that was happening. I think the fact that the actors were kids like them helped.
And I'll leave you with our weather forecast for the week...I'm not ready for that little snowflake.
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