Paul and I headed up to NYC for the weekend. He wanted to go up for World Maker Faire. He says I do a lousy job of explaining what that is, so you can peruse the website yourself if you have no idea what I’m talking about and are curious to know what it is. It also gave us a chance to spend some time with our niece and nephew who we haven’t seen since they visited us at Easter.

They are now 2 and 3/4 years old and are talking much more and mostly intelligibly. They also can entertain themselves much more than they could the last time we were with them. They definitely can still cause lots of trouble though.

Their family moved into a new apartment since the last time we were up visiting them. It’s much bigger than their last apartment and the building has a great roof deck and a playroom for the kids.

While Paul was off at Maker Faire I hung out with his family. It was a beautiful fall weekend, so we got to spend lots of time outside. We enjoyed lunch on the roof deck, and then took a walk in Central Park so the twins could show me the ducks and turtles. We also wound up seeing crayfish. Who would have guessed there were crayfish in Central Park.

Saturday night Paul and I went to see Sutton Foster do a cabaret at the Cafe Carlyle. I’ll write more about that in a separate post.

I got to start Sunday with a NYC bagel. Bagels elsewhere really do pale in comparison. There was a street fair happening on Columbus Avenue, so we walked down to that. We also stopped by a flea market that is regularly held in the court yard of one of the elementary schools. Lily and Ryan stopped to learn how to play hopscotch, or at least their best approximation of it.

We stopped to eat lunch after that where my horrible food karma returned. When I was in high school I went through a long period of time where every time I went out to eat either my food didn’t show up with everyone else’s or whatever they brought me wasn’t what I ordered. This time my food order didn’t get put in properly so they didn’t even start making it until well after everyone else had their food. Not an ideal situation when you’re eating with toddlers. They all wound up wandering off while I ate my meal to avoid peak toddler meltdown at the table.

We did get to spend most of our lunch being amused by drivers backing down the closed off street to get out after ignoring the police barricade blocking it off. In fairness to most of them it wasn’t entirely obvious that both sides of the road were supposed to be closed due to the fact that one self-important guy got out of his car and moved the barricade from the center of the street so that it partially covered both lanes over to one side so that he could drive down the street. He of course didn’t bother to move it back, so that apparently left everyone else thinking they could drive down the street apparently. Then when they hit the street fair on the next block and realized they couldn’t drive through they all had to back out. It was amusing to watch people try and back out at the same time people were trying to turn down the street obviously not getting a clue that it was a bad idea.

Sunday also happened to be my brother-in-law’s birthday so we stopped on the way home to pick up some cupcakes to celebrate.