From Harlem to Carnegie

The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was a big, full day for us, worthy of its very own post.

The kids appreciated having a slow morning, playing, practicing piano, and reading together about the very important, Dr. King.

We then bundled up for a walking tour of Harlem.  They had a special trip going today for the MLK holiday.  Dr. King visited Harlem a few times and I learned something about him that I never knew before today.  Did you know that he was once in Harlem for a book signing tour and was stabbed in the heart by a deranged woman??  He nearly died and was rushed to Harlem Hospital where his life was saved.

The three of us had a great time walking around Harlem for two hours, seeing beautiful churches and architecture and learning a lot more about the history of Harlem than we knew before.  I wish Kevin didn't have to work.  Perhaps we'll return again for another walking tour.

 The famous Abyssinian Baptist Church

 Strivers' Row

 Many, many hair salons

 And ending up at the famous landmark, The Apollo Theater

We quickly hopped the subway home for piano lessons and then got all gussied up for our very first trip to Carnegie Hall.  It was so fun to see our cousin Ava sing in a chorus of singers from all around the world, including a contingent from her high school, The School of the Arts in San Francisco.

As you can see, it was a packed stage so we were barely able to see Ava, but luckily got to see her and hug her briefly after the show.

Just an average Monday for Team Skaggs.

New York Moments

The weekend is still in full force for us (MLK Day) but we've had such a full weekend so far and have a big day today planned, that I thought I should post an update now.

First, a quick update on last week since, as Grandma Diane pointed out on the phone last night, I didn't do a midweek post last week.

Ella's Garden Club had a visitor from the Lower East Side Ecology Center come and teach them about worm composting.  I was happy to not have to go outside to the garden in the bitter cold again.

 

Ella has also taken over Kevin's job of reading a poem to us before starting dinner (our version of grace) with a new book she got for Christmas.

 

And believe it or not, this dish was a hit (and by hit, I mean the kids both said they loved it but only ate 3 bites, because they are actually birds and can survive on almost no food).

Yam and Peanut Stew with Kale

Friday night Kevin went out with a childhood friend from home who was in town so I got to have a sushi/ramen date with my kids all by myself.

 

Saturday we had another one of those "Only in New York" moments.  An exhibit at the New York Historical Society was recommended to us - The Armory Show at 100, a look back at a very famous exhibit 100 years ago of famous artists such as Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin.  It was important because it was the exhibit that introduced Americans to European avant-garde painting and sculpture.  Anyway, we decided given our new membership we would go check it out.  Well, not only were they giving a special tour for kids of the exhibit, it was entirely in Spanish!  Only in New York could we find such a specific tour, completely relevant to us.  Kevin and I had to ask the kids for translation every once in a while.

We all even had a chance to do some hands-on "cubism" after the tour.

Kevin's cousin Greg and his family are in town this weekend.  They are an incredibly talented family.  His wife Wynne and both of his daughters are musicians.  Both daughters have gone to (one is still attending) the School of the Arts in San Francisco.  His oldest daughter Grace is now studying at the oldest art school in the country, in Philadelphia.  They are here this weekend because their youngest daughter Ava is singing at Carnegie Hall on Monday night!  Grace and her mom Wynne have also performed in an orchestra at Carnegie ten years ago or so.  So we were lucky enough to get to catch up with them on Saturday night over dinner.  We'll see them again tonight for the concert.

On Sunday, although Kevin really wanted to try to get in on a tour at The Met, I thought we should give the kids a free day to just have no plans.  While they love doing the tours and I'm sure would not have complained if we said we were heading across the park to The Met, they also really need downtime, of which they get almost none.  They put it to good use.  Ella and Kevin have started writing a story together, taking turns on the laptop writing paragraphs.  And Holden has really taken to a new "toy" he got for Christmas, Snap Circuits.

 

It opened a flood of memories when Holden pulled the circuit board out of the box.  I had completely forgotten that my dad had also bought me a very similar circuit board when I was a kid.  Thirty years ago it wasn't quite as fancy but it was the same idea - learning how to construct electrical circuits to turn on a light, or ring a door bell, or start a fan spinning.  Holden worked on it for hours and can now explain to anyone who asks, the difference between a resistor and a photoresistor. 

Knowing that we'd be watching hours of football in the late afternoon with the 49ers in the playoffs, I decided we should get outside and get some fresh air for an hour or so.  We headed a block over to Central Park and Kevin lead us over to The Ramble, an area of the park that has a lake and hiking trails (it was originally intended as an area to escape from the carriages). 

Trying to scooter down the same slopes they sledded down a couple weeks ago.

It's still cold...

Family soccer game (yes, even I played).

Belvedere Castle

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, people!

Baby It's Cold Outside

You may have heard that we've been experiencing a Polar Vortex here.  While it technically didn't get below zero this week, apparently with the wind chill factor it was about 11 below...  And living as we do in an urban environment where we don't have a car or a heated garage or enclosed walkways between buildings, we have been experiencing the weather, let me tell you.  Walking a half mile to/from school (roundtrip each time for me) is painful.  Monday morning Holden cried all the way to school saying that his face HURT! 

And the poor kids have been cooped up inside all week.  Not that they're complaining.  At school when the kids can't go outside for recess or lunch because of the weather (which frankly, is most of winter), they go to the auditorium and watch movies...ugh.  It's no exaggeration that my kids watch more TV (much more) at school than they do at home.  Why they can't just run free in the gymnasium, I don't know.  Or if they must be quiet and contained, couldn't they at least watch something somewhat educational?  National Geographic instead of Spongebob? 

Obviously Ella's Garden Club wasn't outdoors this week.  Remember this experiment?

Anyway, needless to say, we spent the entire week inside which isn't good for anyone's soul.  We've been a grouchy lot.  Best to stay away from the Skaggs Family this week. 

Warmed up with this yummy and easy Chicken Corn Chowder

Holden had a big week of firsts though.  He started piano lessons and soccer, both of which he is extremely excited about.

Luckily, soccer is indoors.

Ella is continuing soccer, this time as the only girl on her team.

And, because we'd move in and live there if we could, we spent the entire weekend at the American Museum of Natural History.  

On Saturday after soccer we quickly checked out a new exhibit they have about poisons found in nature.  It looks like an incredible exhibit but apparently everyone and their brother had heard about it too, so after a quick walk-through we decided we'd return in a few weeks when the exhibit isn't so new and perhaps even go midweek.  After squeezing out of the poison exhibit we headed downstairs so that the kids could have their first IMAX experience, complete in 3D.  It was called Mysteries of the Unseen World.  

 

 

It was touted as a film that "will transport audiences to places on this planet that they have never been before, to see things that are beyond their normal vision, yet literally right in front of their eyes."  Holden was scared to death.  He is my companion down on the ground as Ella and Kevin ride the roller coasters.  Holden and I are not thrill seekers.  But even he was glued to his seat and enthralled by the technology.

 

While we were at the museum we saw a tour pass by us for the first time.  After a year of membership we just now discovered that they offer free tours every hour.  So on Sunday as we finished brunch at Cafe Lalo (of You've Got Mail fame) the kids decided that we should return to the museum and take a tour this time.  

 

 

I can't tell you what a difference it made walking with a guide.  It was like we were seeing the museum for the first time.  She showed us things in rooms we've been in a dozen times that we had never seen before including a life size gorilla hidden in the rainforest diorama (not the one above - that one's pretty obvious...).  I was also pretty blown away to learn that they have a meteorite on display that is one of the first objects ever created in the solar system!  It is almost 4 billion years old!  And I've walked by it a hundred times without ever noticing it.

 

Kevin and I decided that this year is going to be the year of tours.  Last year we discovered New York City on our own.  Now we'll go deeper and let the experts teach us.  Stay tuned.

January 9th, 2009

My kids were one and three years old when I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  That was five years ago today.  Apparently, your "survivor" timeline starts on the day you were diagnosed since you have survived since that day, not from the day you were cured.  So I guess I'm a five year breast cancer survivor today.  But I don't really like to say that because frankly, my life was never really in jeopardy.  Survivor is much too strong a word for me. 

In spite of the fact that I had a bilateral mastectomy, my cancer was actually caught pretty early.  I went in for my first (and consequently last and only) mammogram and boom, there it was.  No mistake, tiny white star-like dots all in a line.  It looked a lot like snow, actually.  Even though I was only thirty-seven years old, I asked if I could have a mammogram because I had been having a bit of pain.  Also, my mother had had breast cancer and I had heard that I should probably start mammograms earlier with my family history.  I was assured that it couldn't possibly be cancer because I would never be able to feel something so microscopic, and they were right.  The area where I felt the pain wasn't where they found the cancer.  In hindsight, the doctors should have told me that the pain was likely related to the fact that I had recently stopped breastfeeding Holden.  A blocked milk duct.  But then if they had, I wouldn't have gotten the mammogram for another three years or so.

I still remember getting the phone call from the doctor with the biopsy results.  I could hear my heart beating in my ears.  I wrote down on a piece of paper in front of me (which I still have), "evidence of cancer cells".  I called Kevin.  My mom.  My dad.  And then paced circles around our dining room table.  For about 45 minutes until Kevin got home.  Around and around.  Not crying, just pacing, listening to my heart beat.

A bilateral mastectomy probably sounds pretty drastic for early stage breast cancer.  I'm told that it was a more aggressive kind of cancer.  Also, instead of a tumor starting in the milk duct and then getting bigger and passing across the milk duct, as most breast cancers do, mine grew along the inside of the duct, making it too long of an area to do a lumpectomy.  Within a minute of walking into the exam room the surgeon told me and Kevin that a mastectomy of the right breast was necessary.  I told her to take my right arm if she had to, just get it out.  I chose to have them take the other one while they were at it.  A prophylactic mastectomy.  I figured the reconstruction would look a lot better if they did them both at the same time.  After all, I had just breastfed two babies in the last three years and they were offering me a free boob job!  Mostly, I just didn't want to have to worry about cancer on the other side.  There were already "suspicious areas" that they biopsied on the left breast that they were going to "watch". 

Believe it or not, getting a cancer diagnosis with two toddlers in tow wasn't even the worst thing that's ever happened to me.  Actually, looking back, it was a very positive experience.  My community of friends, family, and even strangers all pitched in and made our lives pretty easy.  We had dinners delivered every single day for six weeks.  Kevin's aunt Jane was especially generous with weekly meals delivered for weeks.  We even had credit with meal services for months afterward.  I became very close with neighbors who took turns taking the kids to their houses for playdates.  The parents at Ella's preschool made a schedule of who was going to bring Ella to school and who would bring her home.  Parents I didn't even know.

And my mom.  Man, did she take good care of us.  She drove almost 3 hours every Monday morning and helped with the kids, coordinated pick-ups and drop-offs of the kids to various playdates, accepted deliveries of food, cleaned, drove me to doctors appointments.  She even bathed me those first couple weeks when I couldn't raise my arms over my head.  One of my most treasured memories is sitting in the bathtub as my mom washed my hair and Ella, then 3 years old, took a washcloth to my legs and scrubbed.  Then on Friday afternoons, mom would drive all the way home so that we could have some family time together on the weekends. 

Having breast cancer made me feel more loved than I had ever felt before.  More taken care of.  And even though I had what I like to refer to as the easiest cancer ever - no chemotherapy, no vomiting, no radiation, no hair loss - cancer made me feel a lot stronger.

Because the world was holding me up.

Snow Day

I woke up on Friday morning to a text from the New York Times announcing that all New York City public schools were closed.  We got our first snow day.

Holden had been really sick the night before with a high fever and vomiting so I was planning to keep him home anyway, but once he heard it was a snow day it was amazing how quickly he snapped out of it...

 

Since he had been so sick we didn't do any of the things I assumed we'd do when we finally got a snow day.  No sledding, no snowball fights.  As a matter of fact, with almost no push back from them, we spent several hours doing educational things.  They got into a lesson on Khan Academy about computer programming and spent almost 2 hours on that.  

I had Ella do some extra math problems on some areas she's been having trouble with.  They both read in Spanish for a half hour.  Holden had some homework from the day before to do.  And they both worked on another favorite educational website, Brain Pop Jr.  When it was time for English reading, I decided for our sanity we needed to get out of the apartment.  So the three of us and our three books made it around the corner to Starbucks and sat and read and watched a taxi skid through an intersection and into a light post.  Exciting stuff.

 

I started feeling a little guilty about all of the schoolwork on what was supposed to be a fun day in a child's life, so we spent the rest of the afternoon playing Scrabble (OK, a little educational) and Qwirkle - one of my personal favorite games.

We rested up that night and the next morning so that we were all nice and healthy for the highlight of our weekend - seeing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform.  The tickets were a Christmas gift from Kevin's parents and I've wanted to take the kids for a long time, especially since Ella took modern dance.  If you're not familiar with Alvin Ailey, he was an African-American dancer and choreographer who founded this dance theater in 1958.  He is said to have popularized modern dance and is probably best known for the performance Revelations which we were lucky enough to see on Saturday.  The kids were on the edge of their seats the entire 2.5 hours.  It was a gorgeous mix of modern, jazz and ballet.

(Picture swiped from the internet)

On Sunday I felt like Holden had recuperated enough to earn a sledding adventure in Central Park.  We bought the kids each their own saucer at our local toy store and headed down the street to find a good hill.  It didn't take long.  We were just a few feet into the park when we came across this.

 

(This photo is worth clicking on to enlarge)

 

Believe it or not, even I did some sledding.  Kevin is kicking himself for not getting a photo.

Happy polar vortex, people.