I absolutely love New York. And these are the reasons, if not the evidence.

1. The giant inflatable rat, without irony, blocking a street on a busy Tuesday morning, just blocks from Times Square.
2. Our NY driving actually stopped at a few red lights that I was confident were mere suggestions.
3. Getting out at the busiest intersection we could find near Times Square and let the teens get sucker-punched by the heat, humidity, noise, noise, NOISE, honking (different from the regular NOISE), the lights, the images, and the screens, screens, SCREENS. Honestly, if I didn’t have the rat picture already on my camera, I wouldn’t have even remembered him.

Dropping our bags at a local luggage mafia, we sweltered our way to Bryant Park and the New York Public Library (want actual books? go across the street to the real book library– this one’s for tourists and libio-philes, a word that may have just been coined, but you know what it means). I loved the treasure collections, including one of the 48 remaining Gutenberg Bible and Christopher Robin’s original stuffy collection. Dwayne and I floated through the entire building when we were here eight years ago, but the youngest three only really appreciated it for the air conditioning this trip.

Juggling was being taught right outside under Patience and Fortitude’s noses. (Fun fact, those lions were originally brainstormed to be bison or beavers. Different statues may have changed reading as we know it today.) One of Dwayne’s many, many cool features is he can juggle quite competently. Piper can almost catch a ball. Wes does minimal damage when missing and Kyla can’t even try, she’s laughing so hard.

We got our first slices of NY pizza from Joe’s, and ate it while heading to Times Square, ducking into the bestest stores (M&M and Hershey–who knew they weren’t the same company??) for AC, before walking to the Empire State Building.

By then, we had more than New Yorked enough for the day, so we got our rental, and crashed until our Blue Man Group show that night. (Okay, P & A crashed and didn’t make it to the show.) Kyla volunteered to be covered in paint by the strange blue men and it was appropriately NYWeird for all of us. It’s late– I’ll try to get a video of K’s first Broadway performance later.