Sunday in New York City

On Sunday morning we went to Mass at St. Peter's Church, which happened to be two doors down from our hotel and is also the oldest Catholic parish in New York state. Also, my Catholic friends will be interested to know that St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, North America's first saint, converted into Catholicism as an adult at this parish.

Outside St. Peter's is the Cross at Ground Zero.

We stayed at The Millenium Hilton. My bibliophilic friends will be annoyed and interested to learn that the name was purposefully misspelled to appear "more balanced." Yes, I'm serious.

Mary charmed the waiters at the hotel restaurant every morning.

After breakfast and taking a break in our hotel room, we met Linda and Ethan for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

The poor kids were already due for naps, so Mary easily fell asleep in my sling, but John was having a lot of trouble behaving during the meal. Afterward we walked along Battery Park and John fell asleep in his stroller. Then for novelty's sake we stopped by Century 21, which is a discount resaler, like Ross, but which sells very high end brand names. This place was like Filene's Basement on steroids! It was like the Third World in its chaos! Sweet John woke up from his nap in the middle of that store and was quite alarmed at the madness of it all. Plus he was hungry and thirsty, but Ethan was carrying my backpack with my supplies and we had become separated in the store and could not find each other, so John just cried and waited.

Finally we made it out of that store (you don't know how hard it was even to maneuver!) and back to the hotel room. Mary found John's straw cup and very easily drank out of it. I'm not a big fan of the idea of kids sharing cups, but this was very cute, so I let her keep drinking while I took photos.

She was thrilled with her success. Apparently later when I wasn't looking, she reached up onto a table, grabbed an adult-sized glass of water, pulled it down, and drank out of it successfully!

The day ended with difficulty. Chris was in meetings from 2:00 to 6:30 and I couldn't keep the children cooped up in the hotel room that long. I ended up taking them out for another one of our lengthy walks of about two hours. By the time Chris got out and we met him at his office, the restaurant where we planned to eat had closed. We hopped in a cab, but it was so far past John's normal dinner time, he was so exhausted and overstimulated, he wept uncontrollably and we actually decided to ask the taxi driver to turn around and take us back to the hotel. (Boy, was he confused by that request. I think he was afraid we wouldn't pay him.) We ended up getting room service to let the poor boy calm down.