New York, New York!

I hadn't blogged since May, and just yesterday I broke the ice with this post.  Now that I am back in the blogging world, the task at hand is to blog about our most recent history in order of importance! So dear readers, you're going to be hit with quite a bit of retro-blogging in the coming weeks and probably even month, and for that, you'll have for forgive me.  I still plan to post recent updates here and there between the posts about things that happened in May, and possibly even April.  (Blushing.)

Without further ado, here is the story of the trip we took to New York City right before we came back to Washington.  Since we were already on the East Coast, and visiting New York City had been a dream of ours for several years, we decided there was no better time to visit the Big Apple for the first time.  And even better, friends were going to meet us there and had reserved the hotel room right next to ours!

I packed all of our bags into the car, went and picked The Mr. up after work and then we headed to Savannah to catch our evening flight to NYC.  This photo cracks me up because the looks on the boy's faces sum up the excitement we were feeling at this point.

 Ramps are the best thing ever when you are three.

 We grabbed dinner in the airport, YUM!

 Little Mr. claimed the window seat.

 When we were going through security, TSA made him a junior officer complete with a golden sticker badge, he was pretty happy about it.

 After a short wait on the airplane, we were off!

  One of the best pieces of advice I could give for taking a toddler on an airplane is to bring sparkly stickers with you. This was a construction set with roads and street signs.  Since they are more like plastic than the papery kind of stickers, you can stick and re-stick them on the tray.

 My advice for traveling with a toddler and a baby is to put your toddler on a blanket on the floor with a small bag of toys, and use the seat belt to corral the baby!  Of course this is only allowed once you've reached cruising altitude, and ideally, once the seat belt sign is turned off.

 As the evening wore on, the view out our window got prettier and prettier.

 Stunning!

 The dollar section or party bag supply section of Target often sells light up toy spinners.  This one was lots of fun once the airplane cabin was dark and it could also be used as a flashlight to find lost toys in the dark.  Since it was after bedtime, Little Mr. has his binky in this photo, but if my memory serves me correctly he didn't sleep at all on the flight.

 Little Brother even enjoyed playing with the stickers on the tray a bit.

 The last ribbon of light disappearing.  Such beautiful colors!

 Our first glimpse of New York City!

 It's raining, it's pouring!

Inquisitive eyes. ( This photo makes me want to squeeze and kiss those cheeks, but he is napping as I write this.)

 NYC "rush hour" traffic, even in the middle of the night!  It was an interesting drive though, because everywhere you looked there was something you had heard about before.  The New York Times headquarters was one of the first cool buildings we saw.  And of course lots of theaters.  And apart from all the cool sights, zipping through NYC in a taxi is a death defying act, ha ha!  Their taxi drivers are crazy, but from what I could see, they're good at what they do.

 We stayed at the Residence Inn Marriott in Manhattan. As we were heading up to our hotel room on the 42nd floor, I snapped this photo.  The hotel has 65 floors and it is the tallest hotel in North America.

We were pleased to find out that we had been given a corner room with just short of 2 entire walls of windows!  On the right hand side of this photo you can see the sky is lit up by Times Square.  We couldn't wait to go explore in the morning!