Mommy Musings

I've mentioned on here before, that we live pretty close to New York City.  We really don't go in all that much though, as there is always a ridiculous amount of traffic and everything is just so expensive .  Seriously, it's like $14 just to cross the bridge. Anyways, it's been a while since we went in, and for months  now Emmy has been asking to go into "my New York City" as she called it.  You can see the skyline from certain areas around where we live, and she's always been mesmerized by all the tall buildings.  They also talk about the Museum of Natural History in one of her favorite Mercer Meyer books.  So we had my mom come up last Friday to watch Charlie for the day {she is so not city ready} and we headed in! We've done driving, trains, and buses to get into the city, depending on where we were heading, and for this it was easier to drive.  So we did {and by we I mean Skip...I drove in NYC once  and refuse to every do it again}. We were wo...

Back when I did my 1000th post giveaway, I asked all of you to leave me a comment about what you want me to write about here on the blog. Most people said that they most enjoyed reading stories about being a mom and the girls.  Easy enough to do, since that's what most of my blog is about! But Crystal asked me to talk about what it's like living so close to New York City.  So that's what I'm going to do today! I've lived in northern New Jersey, about half an hour {with no traffic, which never happens} outside of NYC my whole life.  I love living in the suburbs, with the easy access to the city.  I'll be honest, up until I was in college, I really didn't like NYC.  It really was a different place before Rudy Giuliani took office.  He really cleaned the place up and made it much safer. When I was a kid, we were in the city a few times a year.  Every Christmas my parents would take my sisters and I in to see the Radio City Christmas show.  We'd go s...

While I was very lucky that none of my family and friends {other than twelve of my dad's business partners} were killed on September 11, 2001, that day forever changed who I am.  Living that close to NYC, I could see the smoke, the gaping hole where the towers once stood.  I cannot describe how scary it was to have a terrorist attack of that magnitude happen in practically my backyard.  The fear I had of it happening again stayed with me for a really long time.  And on 9/11, life as I knew it changed forever.  My cousin and all the boys I'd come to know and love from his senior class at West Point were now preparing for war.  For years and years I then knew someone deployed at all times.  And as we all military wives and families know, once they come home from war, the war still hasn't left them.  All the men I know still suffer from something they experienced over there.  All because of what happened on 9/11. So when my dad and sis...