Keagan has quite a few friends, some best friends, some sometimes-friends, some -as he calls them- “baby friends” and he has one, Lili. We’ve met her when she surfed our couch with her mom this summer and Keagan was completely and utterly smitten by her. To our incredible luck, Lili lives in Manhattan and we were ever so kindly invited to stay with her and her parents.
I really think, in Lili, Keagan has found a true soul mate. The two of them played their complex games of play-pretend together for hours uninterrupted. No arguments, and the rare discussions they had (usually who plays the “Mama” this time around and if Daddies really have to snore the whole night), they resolved amicably within minutes. Every night they fell asleep in the same bed, holding hands.
As a bonus Lili has marvelously great and funny parents, a real joy to hang out with. They are so much fun to talk to, we stayed up way too late every night. We talked politics, food, work-life balance, New York, complimented each-others on our obviously brilliant parenting skills (hey, our kids are so brilliant, we must have done a perfect job) and laughed a lot.
New York -Day one – for everyone who just isn’t that interested in every tiny thing our oh so cute son said and did. It’s a bit like dark matter. I know such a thing probably exists but I just cannot fully wrap my mind around the concept…
We landed in JFK, hailed a taxi and rode to our friends’ place on Mulberry street. There is a fixed price for a ride from JFK to Manhattan and so our driver couldn’t ask for more money than that, eventhough Tobi had given him the area code (212) instead of the house number (121) and had him drive in circles for ages. But that conundrum was solved with one call to Vesna, our friend, and after some further swearing of the driver (which substantially diminished his tip), we finally arrived.
Mullberry street is in the south of Manhattan, where Little Italy and Chinatown meet. The coolest neighborhood ever.
To get to our friends’ apartment (even with the correct house number) is not a straight forward thing. You have to go through an iron gate, unlock a door by turning the key clock-wise, cross the hallway of another house and a courtyard past a very noisy air conditioner, go down another hallway and then climb a few flights of narrow stairs. It felt like a quest. Having read to many of the Harry Potter books, I half expected to cross some magical barrier onto platform 9 3/4…
They are renovating their apartment right now. And it seems to be a transatlantic constant that what can go wrong when renovating will -with absolute certainty- go wrong. A new thing I learned though, is that more can go wrong when cooking with gas is involved.
As a consequence of the ongoing renovation, the apartment was in a lovable state of disarray. We were made very welcome, and felt home immediately.
Then Tobi who had worked till midnight the previous day, wanted to take a little nap and Vesna, the little ones and I took a little tour thorough the neighborhood, during which I noticed, that they live in walking distance of every cool shop on the planet. The only thing I bought this evening though, was a set of NYPD cars for Keagan. For this gigantic amount of restraint I will be awarded loads of Karma-points, I’m sure.
How Vesna and Craig mustered the energy to host us amidst their thousand responsibilities, their jobs and the renovation, I do not know. In their place I would have been a weeping puddle of incredibly overwhelmed self-pity. But their hospitality was perfect in every way and their company was pure bliss
As a bonus Lili has marvelously great and funny parents, a real joy to hang out with. They are so much fun to talk to, we stayed up way too late every night. We talked politics, food, work-life balance, New York, complimented each-others on our obviously brilliant parenting skills (hey, our kids are so brilliant, we must have done a perfect job) and laughed a lot.
As a bonus Lili has marvelously great and funny parents, a real joy to hang out with. They are so much fun to talk to, we stayed up way too late every night. We talked politics, food, work-life balance, New York, complimented each-others on our obviously brilliant parenting skills (hey, our kids are so brilliant, we must have done a perfect job) and laughed a lot.