{ new york - part three }

Since Orva and I were sitting around by ourselves most of the days we were in New York, we had a lot of time to just hang out (and take pictures).

Make a Smilebox slideshow

I know she looks scared in this photo, but she's just looking really hard. This is actually how she looks most of the time...VERY alert.



Aside from just hanging out, I spent a lot of time on the phone with my mom and sisters getting advice and did a bit of a "baby boot camp" to get Orva on a good napping schedule. She started out not being able to fall asleep by herself at all, so I started putting her down in her crib awake and then 5-5-5-ing her (letting her cry for five minutes, patting her, letting her cry for five more minutes...) until she fell asleep. Very sad, but she learned quickly (sort of - it took the whole two and a half weeks we were in New York) and does great now. She's even fully recovered and still likes me.

She did lots of kicking when she was trying to fall asleep.



Notice the sweaty hair...



*Disclaimer - I know this sounds brutal, but she really didn't end up crying that much. It usually only took a few times of patting her and she was asleep...I say "baby boot camp" only in jest, of course.

When we weren't home hanging out and working on napping, we were out and about doing all sorts of fun things:

Yankees Game (Orva slept through most of it)





Metropolitan Museum



Wicked (I thought it was incredible, Brad said it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be...)



One of my very favorite things we did was our own "dine around". We didn't get any pictures of it (bummer), but we rode the subway to Greenwich Village and then just started to walk around. We decided to choose three different restaurants - one for drinks and appetizers, one for our main course, and one for dessert. We just walked around until we saw a restaurant that looked good and then went in. We kept thinking that we'd probably end up with at least one of the restaurants being horrible, but amazingly enough, all three choices were absolutely delicious! We went to a little Mexican restaurant and had some incredible chips and guacamole with some sort of mango lime drink and one with pineapple and cilantro in it. It was so good. Then we went to a really fancy restaurant for the main course - Brad had a really good steak with some incredible mashed potatoes and I had salmon with some really good veggies. Their bread was also really delicious. For dessert, we found this little frozen yogurt shop. It was so fun! If you're every traveling in a new city and have some time, I highly reccommend this method of finding dinner.

*I know you probably weren't dying for a play-by-play of our menu, but that really was one of my favorite things we did, and with no pictures, I wanted to make sure I remember it!