Guests Galore!

One of our favorite parts of being here in NYC is having friends and family visit us and fall in love with this city. It is exhausting but SO, SO fun! S

Two weekends ago, Ed’s parents visited. We did a bunch of touristy things, like Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Trump Tower, American girl store and Disney store (to get Kinsley’s birthday presents), and visiting the 9/11 Museum. Ed and I had done all of this, except for the Museum and let me tell you, I was very, very impressed. It is so well done and packed with information! It is so somber and heartbreaking, but I honestly would love to go back again because I know I didn’t see half of what they had. Highly recommend this if you come to NYC! We also got a date night courtesy of them…what did we do? Try a new restaurant and go to Kohls, of course. Such is the life of a parent…no kids means a time to get errands done. And, we got to eat at Stickys which is seriously one of our favorite chicken places to eat in the city.

Then, this past weekend, our old neighbors from NC visited us. It was so good to see them and to show them the city. We did a lot of the same things as above, but also visited Central Park, Statue of Liberty, and ate pizza in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Bridge Park overlooking the city. We also went to Black Tap, an amazing restaurant with these huge crazy milkshakes. Man, they were full of sugar but SO, SO good. Guess we should have known when every location we tried had a 45 minute to an hour wait. Blake has been dying to have a hat like daddy’s, so after visiting a store and finally finding a child’s size hat, he couldn’t take it off. It really made him look like a little boy!

We graciously had a ministry partner give us some money under the condition that we used it to make memories with our family, so Ed took a vacation day yesterday and we spent the day going to the Central Park Zoo and viewing the mummy exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. It was a long day, but so much fun!

Add in Easter (which we celebrated with church family, friends, and teammates) and normal life things like a spring concert at Kinsley’s school, nicer weather so we can enjoy the park and spend hours playing, and Brynn turning 2 months old, and it has been a very full last few weeks. Here are the last few weeks in pictures!

Let me pause to tell you about the picture above. The girl in the pink shirt beside Kinsley in the bottom is a girl who just came from Japan and only speaks Japanese. She has been paired up with another girl in the class who also speaks Japanese in order to help her understand and translate. Poor thing left early the first 3 days of school and one day she was crying – I can’t even imagine coming in the middle of the year, not understanding very much or being able to speak the language, and having to sing in a spring concert just a week later. Bless her heart.