New York City

We were able to visit New York City recently.  M loves the Statue of Liberty.  We introduced her to the Lady a couple years ago with books.  She has told us she wants to go since she could talk about it!  Of course, it helps that we have relatives in the City, too, so she always wanted to visit them.

We only visited for a weekend, arriving in Brooklyn Heights Friday afternoon and leaving Sunday afternoon.  Most of our site-seeing was completed on Saturday, which was exhausting...especially for this pregnant lady!

We began our big day with M and E's first subway ride.  (M understood about a subway because we've been reading Cricket in Times Square.)  We first went to the top of the Empire State Building.  Below is the view of the top of the ESB from the 86th floor's observatory.

 From there we went to Times Square and then we took the free Staten Island Ferry so we could view the Statue of Liberty.  (I'm leaving out that we had expensive hot dogs for lunch and three bathroom stops between the ESB and Times Square.  Seriously!)

 On the return trip the children were both happy to watch out the window.  It worked out much better than trying to be outside trying to "fight" for a spot to see with two small children.

 We went to the local (from our relatives' home in Brooklyn) park a couple of times.  The playground was great, and the views were awesome.

 It was a really good trip, though very tiring for all of us.  Naps were skipped, and bedtime tended to be late...not to mention all the walking around that we did!

M and E are still talking about the trip.  Since seeing Lady Liberty in person, E is also fascinated with her and still talking about her.  It was a great trip.  I'm sure we'll return in a couple more years to see the Statue of Liberty in person.  Obviously, we didn't do MANY things that we could have, but that's part of vacation with little ones.  We had a great time with Derek's aunt, uncle, and cousins, and that was a huge part of our trip!

You can also see how we prepared the kids for the NYC trip, too!