We Have a Car!

Chris recently received a very deserved promotion to director of GE Healthcare's NY/New England region. He now works from home 3-4 days a week, then spends the other day or two traveling to whatever hospital needs him most. There are so many reasons this arrangement is awesome, not the least of which is that we now have a car! There are approximately 7,432,008,543 things to do on the tiny island of Manhattan, but after awhile it can still start to feel claustrophobic and one can get in a rut, doing the same things all the time. So this past Saturday, while Chris spent the day at school, the girls and I took to the open road! I didn't even plan where we were going, just started driving north. When we entered Connecticut and I started seeing signs for the Norwalk aquarium, I figured that was a great place to go.
There was an IMAX theatre as part of the aquarium, so we watched a movie first, then started exploring. If you ask Noelle what her favorite animal is, she will excitedly scream, "Fish! I love fish!"--so you can imagine she was in heaven. In the pictures below, you can see that they got to touch stingrays and jelly fish. They each had their own aversion...Noelle thought touching a sting ray was the worst idea ever while Red was fine petting them, and Delilah was terrified of the jellyfish while Noelle would have been happy to take one home as a pet to sleep with.

 

 

There is another incident that bears mentioning. We went to the aquarium's cafeteria, loaded our lunch onto trays, but when I went to check out, my wallet was missing. I panicked. My girls were starving, but I had no way of paying. Additionally, we were low on gas, and I wasn't going to be able to pay for gas to get home. Ahhhh!!!! The lunch lady was sweet enough to just give my girls the food, and I took them to a table. Then I did something totally crazy. The aquarium isn't huge, but it's very long. The IMAX was at the opposite end from where we were, and I figured my walled had fallen out in the theatre because at one point my bag had fallen off the seats. The problem was that, with small children, it was a good 25 minute walk away. Not to mention the fact that I needed to be scanning the floor on the way there, checking behind fish tanks, checking with the 2 information booths that were at opposite ends of the aquarium, etc...easy to do by myself, but not with a 3 year old who keeps trying to climb in the jellyfish tank to go swimming. Plus, I couldn't take them until they finished eating because they were starving, which would have meant waiting another 30-45 minutes, with my wallet just sitting out there somewhere. So, like I said, I did something crazy. I introduced myself to another family in the cafeteria who were just sitting down to eat and asked if they could watch my girls. My girls are great with new people, so I knew they would behave. Then, with a quick prayer to God to keep my girls safe while I essentially abandoned them, I took off and dashed around the aquarium like a madwoman. I found my wallet, and raced back to the cafeteria, praying that everything would be fine when I found them. I wish I had taken a picture of how I found them, but I was too shocked and happy to grab the camera. I'll describe, without the slightest exaggeration, the scene I returned to:

Noelle, Delilah, and the kids of the family I left them with had turned the entire cafeteria into one big party. All the kids in the cafeteria were dancing together, sharing food, and playing as if all these families had known each other for years. It was the cutest, funniest, most endearing thing ever. When I thanked the family for watching them, they thanked me in turn for having such sweet girls who wanted everyone in the room to get to know each other. :)

 



What a great first outing!!!!