Moving Homes

I started writing this post a while ago, while we were in the throes of apartment hunting, so it is a little more impassioned than it would be if I wrote it today. However, anyone who has lived in New York can attest to the special brand of hell that is apartment hunting in NYC. Rents are ridiculous, and the amount of space that you get for said enormous sum of money is depressing (ie, tiny!). Things that are givens in most other places (natural light, a full bath, a refrigerator!) are often listed as amenities in NYC.

You start your search with a dream in your heart of that perfect little gem that you will be the one to find - an apartment that is the right size, in the right part of town, for the right price. After several weeks of obsessively trolling real estate listings, being scammed by brokers who claim an apartment is in one neighborhood when it is actually several less desirable neighborhoods away, and then discovering that the one apartment that you actually do like is operated by a horrible landlord (thank you, Google, for saving me from that one!), depression sets in. You get beaten down and you start making concessions. That rent number that you so carefully budgeted for, that was actually the higher end of what you wanted to pay? Well, maybe we can raise that number $100/month to see what that gets us. Or, maybe it's time to start looking farther out, or maybe a one bedroom will do for the three of us, after all.

But! This story has a happy ending! We're going to sign a lease for a two-bedroom apartment in Prospect Heights tomorrow. It's $200 under what we wanted to pay, and while not huge or brand new, it's a cool little space with a lot of storage that should serve us well. I feel really lucky - blessed, really - and while I'm going to miss the east village, and our little studio apartment, it is definitely time for us to move on. It will be hard for me to say good-bye, though. I've lived in this apartment for seven years, which is actually the longest I've ever lived anywhere. Sean and I began our marriage and our family in this apartment, and its "cheap" rent is one of the things that enabled me to work from home. I hope that whoever lives here next loves and enjoys it as much as we have.

icff

This weekend was dedicated primarily to the ICFF and a bunch of the different design events surrounding it. Friday I hiked around the exhibits at the Noho Design District with V and on Saturday, Sean, V and I went to ICFF and did a speed run through the Javits - we managed to get through all of the ICFF in three hours. Sean and V pooped out after two hours and Sean took V up to the lobby of the Javits to hang out, while I finished up. When I caught up with them, Sean was busy flying V around the lobby, which he said he'd been doing for the past hour. That girl really likes to play airplane.

Even if we didn't have a bored/grumpy infant on our hands, we've always preferred to breeze through ICFF, stopping only at the booths that really catch our eye. The best jumps out, you know what I mean? I find it's often a good method of editing, especially when there is so much going on (to the point that it can be overwhelming!) although we do occasionally miss some great things. Anyway, we'll be covering ICFF on our main blog, so I won't get into it here, other than to leave you with a few photographs of my favorite products/exhibits from the weekend.

Mother's Day

I meant to write about what we did for my first mother's day last week, but never got the chance (crazy week!). Sean took V and I to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a picnic. It was a gorgeous day - perfect for a picnic. Unfortunately, we got booted from the gardens (no blankets! no strollers! no food!) and so we walked over to Prospect Park and had our picnic there instead. V seemed to enjoy the grass, and spent a lot of time looking up at the sky. We ate, napped, looked at flowers, and flew V around like an airplane. In fact, while doing so, V gave me the best Mother's Day gift - some certified-real giggles. It was my first time hearing her do that, and it was awesome.

Easter weekend

Happy monday! We had a lovely banana chocolate chip pancake eating, Good Friday service attending, impromptu dinner and homemade Cachaça drinking with friends, Battlestar Galactica watching, Easter service attending, Brooklyn wandering, Easter brunching, sugar overloading, and egg dying long weekend. Lovely.

Oona and the MRI

I just got back from getting an MRI for my hip/leg...I'm not typically claustrophobic, so it wasn't that bad, but I was really surprised by how loud the machine was. The whole time I was in there, I kept thinking of this video of a little girl flipping out that was edited into a song by her parents. The MRI machine made a cacophony of beats and noises that reminded me of either really bad techno or this video of Oona, and it was way more fun to try to remember this video than the former.