New York City, Here We Come--Almost!

This past weekend for my birthday, my sweet husband took us up to New York City--almost. We stayed in a hotel on the New Jersey side (the kids LOVE to go to the hotel--they would live there if they could!) and while we were on our way up there, it began to snow. We've had flurries here where we live but so far, nothing has stuck to the ground. We were all pretty excited about the white stuff, especially since we had packed all of the winter gear to take with us.

Sean took us to Panda Express for dinner at my request. He is so wonderful! We had to navigate almost 10 miles out of the way to find this place but it is what I've been craving and we don't have one ANYWHERE close by. We hung out at the mall, did a little shopping and then headed back to the hotel since that was all we were hearing from the kids--"Can we go back to the hotel, pleeeaaassseee????" The kids got ready for bed and snuggled in to watch a movie while Sean and I tried to figure out what buses we were supposed to take into the city.

Well, the next morning, we wake up to bitter, and I mean BITTER, cold weather with lots of wind and we both looked at each other like, "Are we back in Chicago?" After checking out the weather reports, we made the sad decision that we shouldn't even try to go to the city because we would probably get there and have to turn around and come right back due to our children's lack of tolerance for cold, windy weather. I was bummed but hey, what's a mom to do?

Well, I'm so glad we came prepared with our winter clothes because that is what we did--we got the kids all bundled up and we took them out to the back parking lot where they had piled snow up from plowing and we let the kids loose. It was so fun to watch them play with each other and then they started a snowball fight with Sean. Jaxon is one to watch out for! He's very sneaky and was having a ball throwing snow at Abby and hunting down his dad. After almost an hour, I was totally frozen and insisted that my little popsicles head back inside. We got them warmed up with a hot bath and then we loaded up and headed to the biggest Toys R Us store I've ever seen! The kids went crazy and so did Sean and I as we tried to navigate around all of the insane people there. I need to make a note to self to NEVER shop on the Saturday before Christmas at a toy store! We had a lot of fun and finally were able to convince the kids that we needed to head home. They were so tired that they both fell asleep in the car. The picture was priceless!