It is contagious!

This girls were complaining that I never play with them anymore, and I realized that they are right.  I have such a crazy class schedule this trimester that I am always working working working.  Also, I realized that Juliette will be nine years old in April.  Nine!  We are almost into double digits!  And nine is halfway to eighteen. Eighteen! She is almost in college!  It is going by much too fast and I need to stop and enjoy it more, because the girls really are a lot of fun right now and they still love me and think I am pretty near perfect.  So, the tickle monster came out of hiding and attacked the girls. This is more of an audio track then a video, but it's good to get you smiling and laughing:

What you don't hear: Cosette telling me "Mommy, when I laugh too hard I can't breathe.  I must be allergic to tickling!"

What happened... NYC, take two.

We went to NYC after Irene.  We enjoyed a blustery day there, walked in Central Park, went to the Central Park Zoo, bought candy at the M& M store, didn't let the girls buy toys at either FAO Schwartz or Toys R Us... and then they shut down the city.  Really.  The city shut down in preparation for Irene.

So we came home. And stayed home for a week after the hurricane lead to wide spread power outages.

We reschedule our trip to NYC for November, and finally got to enjoy a weekend without natural disasters of one sort or another.

If you received our Christmas card this year you saw as at the top of Rockefeller Center:

We also went to the Statue of Liberty- although we couldn't go in it because it is being renovated. So those two little dots standing at the base of the statue? That's my girls!

We went the 9/11 memorial, which was truly beautiful.  Greg even handled it. The girls knew about 9/11 because they'd learned about it on the 10 year anniversary; but they are so young that to them it was just a really really cool waterfall, and a great big park for playing.  They did cartwheels!  They ran!  They pretended to be airplanes!  Oh.  Um.  I didn't know if that was quite appropriate, so I asked them to stop running around like airplanes, and of course then they kept asking "Why can't we be airplanes, mommy?  What is wrong with playing airplanes, mommy?"

We walked by the Occupy Wall Street camp, which was really much smaller then it appeared to be on the news, and which confused Juliette and Cosette, who commented "But what are they doing?  They don't look like they are doing anything!"  We bought candy at the MM store.  We didn't let them buy toys at the American Girl Doll Store or the Lego store.  Oh wait... apparently Greg is like a kid himself in the Lego store, so he did let them buy toys there. We stayed up far too late and enjoyed the lights of Times Square.

And finally, we saw Spiderman on broadway, which was really lame, but exciting because it was Juliette and Cosette's first broadway show; and we had a wonderful evening with our friends Chad and Shilpa.

The girls are already planning our next trip into the city; this time they want to see Wicked.  Or Mary Poppins. And they want more M&M's.  And Lego's.  And this time we are buying something at the American Girl Doll store. And they want to see Daddy's office, which is in Times Square, we just didn't go in it last time. And and and... and I can't wait!  The nice thing is that the girls are so much fun at this age and they make me see everything with excitement and joy.  Just wait until I tell you about our trip to Walt Disney World this past December!

We were supposed to be sitting at our first broadway play with the girls this afternoon.  Instead, I was doing laundry and vacuuming and yelling at the girls to pick up the playroom.  Thanks to Irene, our broadway was shut down.

Come on Irene*.

Come on!

I want to start the school year on a high note, with everything running smoothly on schedule.

Instead we are dealing with the uncertainty of when and where Hurricane Irene is going to hit us. Probably on the first day of school.

Great.

The weather channel loves this stuff.  Weather threat is EXTREME! Which, apparently, is one level below CATASTROPHIC! I am really hoping it just takes a sharp right and blows out to sea.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to take the girls for a trip into NYC this weekend.  We promised we'd see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.  Hmm.  Last week they had an earthquake, which makes me want to stay away from tall buildings.  This week they are expecting a hurricane, which makes me want to stay home and batten down the hatches.

So here is something to cheer you up, because I realize that I haven't posted pictures of my girls in a while.

**I know, I know, it's Eileen, not Irene.

Pretty pretty bar graphs.

Please check out my post in Raising Scientists if you'd like an explanation of this:

Figure 1:  Here is a graph representing data I wish were true.  Nom nom nom, I'll go buy stock in Reese's!