Spring

I think spring is here to stay. I hope I didn't jinx it. Today Shane got me a new lens. He got it used for a good price. I decided I am OK keeping my Olympus and really I realize it's not a bad camera at all. I just needed a better lens than the kit one. So I played a little with aperture today and here are some of my shots. It's amazing to me how much more light a wide aperture can bring and with my older lens I just didn't have that option. I guess now I know the difference. I will keep practicing this summer and I am excited for the rain and dark days to go away and for me to get some fun shots of my kids. Hopefully. 

 My dog, Tom Tom. I think this is one of the best pics of him, mostly because I can really see his hair and nose and not like before where all you could see was just this black spot. He really needs a haircut but I love him anyway.

 Aren't these flowers so pretty? We have them all over our neighborhood.

 Peach Tree blossom.

 The wind started picking up and it was hard to get a real clear shot. I like it anyway though.

Which ones are your favorites, if any? 

Thank you sweet Shane for my new unbirthday gift. I love you!

NYC-Part 6-End of trip

Tuesday was our last full day in NY. We were hoping to make it a short and easy day, having seen most of what we had planned by then.
We met our friend Dan who lives there with his family. It was fun to meet his cute, adorable daughter and just hang out at FAO Schwartz and later on we also had lunch together. He served his mission in Romania and he also went to BYU.

I loved this little nursery at FAO

 Lego stuff. I got pictures of the Lego Star Wars because this is Dacian's favorite game on the Wii right now.

And check out the price of the Barbie foosball table. I wonder which celebrities bought that. :)

 And here's the famous piano that was in the movie "Big" with Tom Hanks and I am sure in other movies as well.

Quickly after we hurried to the MET. 

 How beautiful is this painting? It was one of my favorites.

Oana, my cousin gave us free tickets and we were excited to go see a little bit of the museum. We got there rather late around 2pm and everyone probably can figure that is a HUGE museum and a day or a week may not be enough. We went to the Impressionist gallery and saw Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Rodin, Degas and many others. 

The knights, swords and the Chinese and Japanese collections were also pretty cool. We also liked all the Samurai stuff. 

I loved the museum and stayed there until close at 5pm. 

We wanted to go home at this point but alas, the procrastinators we are we hadn't gotten anyone any presents in our rush from here to there so we had to go after that. And another fault of mine or ours is the inability to decide on something to buy quickly. We went to Times Square to see if the ambulant vendors were still out there with the cheaper t-shirts, etc but we only found one and all the stuff he had was for adults. So we went into the Times Square Toys R Us which really is no ordinary toy store. They have a lot of characters build out of legos and just their selection of everything is amazing. The Barbies were awesome. I wanted to get Lavi the Statue of Liberty Barbie but it was way too expensive and Lavi is not yet playing Barbies.
As much as I hurried we didn't make it home too early so our last day with our good friends was rather short. Of course they waited for us with another great dinner and bought what we heard was an amazing cheesecake from Junior's. It was pretty much as good as everyone said it would be and more. So fluffy, I think it was made with ricotta instead of the usual cream cheese. It was very rich so I couldn't even finish a whole piece. I fully recommend Junior's cheesecake or just the restaurant which is in Times Square if you ever are in NYC.
Again, we want to thank our friends for how much they spoiled us, their hospitality and love, and for how well our kids were taken care of by my parents. When I got home (Shane went on to DC and Boston-lucky him) the kids didn't want my parents to leave. It was so sweet. It was apparent they did many fun things and were happy and to be honest I didn't have a doubt.

NYC-Part 5

Two more days and I have NY trip covered. Seriously, we did and saw so much that I feel like I have to do it justice by a post a day. But it's sure tedious and I don't know if I can do this for all our future trips. But I shouldn't complain, the more trips the better, right? 

Monday we took off earlier than usual and went to Fort Hamilton. Well, being a holiday they were closed. We took the subway all they way over to Brooklyn and then walked a mile to this place only to find it closed. Also it had just snowed all night so it was rather cold but I love snow so I was happy to see everything all white. 

We wanted to go back to Trinity Church near Wall Street and go to the grave and see Hamilton's grave.
Shane, my sweet historian, took advantage of our trip to see things that he's been dreaming about for quite a while. Hamilton is one of his favorite presidents. But alas because of snow we couldn't go in the cemetery so we just took pictures from the outside.

Grave at Trinity


 So next headed to Flaurence Tavern, a place where President Washington stopped to eat and celebrate right before his inauguration at St. Paul's Catherdral. This Tavern was the happening place at the time and the building is the original one. The downstairs is a restaurant where we ate lunch and the walls were covered in the original wood. We had a delicious lunch that was quite affordable for how fancy the place looked inside. Upstairs there was a museum with a model of the old tavern and artifacts from that era, lots of paintings, old flags, and even the original wall paper on the walls which was amazing. I don't remember all the facts and the famous company name which made the wallpaper but they used to sell it with some pretty scenery, waterfalls and then painters would come add paint over it.  In this one room there were different scenes from battle with George Washington on them. We were lucky to only pay a buck since it was President's day and it was on discount from $10. We didn't even think it would be that cool, and the museum was way bigger than it looked from the outside.

From there we walked to Sea Port, where they have these old ships that you can tour and go inside but because of the Holiday it was closed. You win some, you lose some. 

In front of this place we also saw about twenty heavily armed cops with vests on just hanging out. I think they had dangerous men in their van or something. I was a little worried but all was fine. Actually, I was amazed how many cops actually are everywhere. It made me feel safe to see a couple at every subway station. 

From Seaport we went to Times Square again and then to Grand Central Station. That place is big and beautiful and full of life. Always busy. It reminded me of our train stations and how much we were there for any and every trip we took. Right outside the station you can see Chrysler Building. This is my favorite building in NY. Next we went to the New York Library but it was too late so that was closed as well.

Chrysler Building

New York Public Library

St. Patrick's Cathedral

Inside St. Patrick's

Madonna with Christ

By this time we were pretty tired and were looking forward to sitting down at the Opera which wasn't very far. I was worried I would be too tired and didn't want to fall asleep but I was very much awake and enjoyed the opera immensely. Placido was amazing, and so sweet at the end. He seemed so nice, just caring towards  all the people he sang with, encouraging the audience to keep clapping for them. It was a joy to be able to go there.
I wanted and decided we'd go see Wicked but the prices were too huge for good tickets and the bad or OK seats were all sold out. I just couldn't justify $170 per person. So, one day we may see it but this trip we were OK with the opera for an exchange.
Phew! One more day and NY will be covered.

Love my girl

I adore this little girl. I have fun taking photos of her. Her eyes always sparkle. She is the apple of my eyes. She is at maybe my favorite age except for the occasional tantrum (I think we are having less but now that I said that I just jinxed it.) And except maybe that she's not potty trained yet. OK, maybe that is a lot of excepts. But she is talking and saying funny, silly things, she's loving, she super cuddly, she's a great little dancer, she sings all day long, and she would take several baths every day if we let her. 

The other day when we went out to walk to the dog she was skipping saying: "Happy, happy, happy" in the cutest voice ever.  She loves Dacian and seriously tries so hard to be just like him. She copies everything he does. I caught her hugging him the other day. So sweet. Dacian was so happy and got my attention to see how sweet his sister was. Of course there are plenty of altercations but I love to see the friendship that is developing and the fact that they really love one another. When she was born I felt like it would take forever until they would be able to play together and now that time has come and I can't be happier. 

She also sure has a mind of her own. She's stubborn and so far doesn't like it at church. She keeps saying all throughout the day that "we no go to church  today". She's so attached to us she doesn't  like being left there. Funny how Dacian couldn't wait to get rid of us and didn't want to come home at the end of nursery time. She did fine for a while and now she doesn't like it in there again. She acts shy around strangers but trust me this kid is not shy. She just needs a little time to warm up to someone, kind of like me. In fast I think she is a lot like me personality wise. I do hope she'll grow up with a lot less confidence issues than I had. Anyway, I love that she is mine. She can turn my bad mood to a happy one in seconds and in fact I've been in great moods lately and I can say a lot of that is because of her, because she makes me laugh and because I take the time to drop everything I am doing and just play with her. 

Don't worry, I love my son too so he'll get a post soon too. Here he is being a sloth, so he says. :)

NYC-Part 4

I couldn't wait for this day. Two reasons: our friends spoiled us some more with tickets to the Symphony at Carnegie Hall and the fact that we were going to see my cousin, Oana who lives there now.

The symphony was very good, we had good seats and I liked that the end song was an African song with lots of drums being used. Thank you again for this nice treat, plus I can brag about having gone to Carnegie now. :) 

We left in the morning just the two of us. We decided to see more of uptown Manhattan this day. We took the Subway straight to Central Park. It was a nice, sunny day but boy was it cold. We went to 5th ave, Trump towner, saw all the fun and famous shops, saw the place where they broadcast and film for the Today show, the beautiful St. Patrick's cathedral and then it was time to meet our friends to go to the symphony. 

Our meeting with my cousin was after the show. We decided to meet at the opera. We walked through Central Park really wishing it were summer instead and I could see that pretty park with all the fresh, vibrant green. Looking at all my pictures I wish I had some more color in them. 

Meeting Oana was great. It was so fun to see her again. We walked around a bit, we went inside the opera to see what was playing and our friends, the amazing people that they are got us tickets to the opera for the next day. We were super excited because Placido Domingo was in it and how cool is that to go see him in person? The name of the opera was Ifgenie en Tauride. Another cool place we saw after we left the opera right across the street was the LDS temple. 

After seeing the temple we were all hungry and decided to go to "Eataly," this place that our friend heard was great. It was indeed the coolest store EVER. Wow, the meats, cheeses, chocolates, everything looked so fresh and delicious. They were even making their own fresh pastas there. The only sad thing is this being such a popular place the waiting time for our seats at the restaurant was about 1.5 hours. It probably didn't help that it was a weekend, and a long one at that.(President's day was the next day) So we took off in search of a good pizzeria. We were told all pizzas are good in NY.  Shane did a search on Yelp on his phone and not far from where we were we found Waldo's Pizza. We were a little worried when we first got there because we were the only ones but soon after more people showed up. The pizza was very fresh and great. It had a super thin crust and I got everyone to go along for a white sauce one. I am not so fond of the red sauce. 

Now on to the pictures...

Statue dedicated to General William Tecumseh Sherman by the people of NYC. This statue was what we first saw as we entered Central Park. Right next to it were parked lots of carriages with horses ready to take you on a fun, expensive ride. 

5th ave shops, Trump Tower and Cathedral

Carnegie hall was in renovation so this is my best picture

In Central Park

The Met-New York Opera with cousin Oana, and our friends

LDS Temple

NYC-Part 3

Well, our third day was so much fun. We headed to Walt Whitman's birth place and house which is now a museum in Long Island. The house was adorable, all build by hand by his dad. There were lots of families living in this house. I loved seeing this cute and quite adorable house. The dad had built huge windows and I loved all the light that was in this tiny house. Apparently houses had small windows back then.
From there we went another 40 minutes to Vanderbilt mansion. This guy was so rich, had several buildings all super spread out, so much land all overlooking a body of water but I forget the name. He had a passion for hunting and all things nature and life. I felt like the whole mansion was a natural history museum. The architecture was made in the Spanish style. Very pretty. It was super cold out so it was nice that we were mostly inside.

Once back in the city we went to see the Stock Exchange Building, Trinity Church and then dinner in Little Italy.

Walt Whitman

His birth place/house

From inside the house

Gogu took this picture of me and I love it. 

Vanderbilt Mansion

Vedeti pupaza? 

New York Stock Exchange Building

Trinity Church

George Washington Statue

This is how I looked most of my trip. Funny! Courtesy of Gogu

Wall Street and Financial District and Trinity Church

This is taken later in Little Italy after a whole frustrating ride over there where we couldn't find parking. We also stayed in line quite a while to get our seats and then some more to get our food, but let me tell you, this was the best Italian food bar none. Gina said it was comparable with what she had in Italy or Spain. Yum! Excuse the blurry pic but I have the hardest time taking pictures in low light. Hmmm...

Aren't our friends so cute and sweet. It was so fun to hang out with them. Miss them already. 

Are you bored of my adventures yet? I have 3 more days still to come. Oh well, it's for us mostly so I don't forget all the details of this wonderful trip.