October 29, 2019
Good Morning! Hope you had a fantastic weekend!
On Wednesday last week around 1pm, Jim’s brother Ryan, his wife Annelise and their youngest baby Becket came to visit us. J was still at work so I took them around for a walk in downtown and then just hung out at home catching up. When J came home he had a birthday cake with him that we ordered a couple of days before. Both R and A turned 30 in October so we wanted to celebrate them with a fall decorated chocolate cake. After desert we walked to downtown for dinner and that’s about it for their first day.
The Fish Church in the back of our apartment was open for once. So pretty inside
We found the stone with the man who Becket got his name from
On Thursday, J decided to work from home and after lunch we all took the train in to Manhattan. From Grand Central we walked on 42nd to Public Library and then up 5th Ave, they wanted to see St Patrick’s Cathedral. When J and I went inside years back you could just walk in, now it’s a tourist attraction where you have to check bags and stuff, weird. Then we walked across the city a bit to some New York pizza place, that was the number one thing R and A had asked for:) Then we walked to Times Square for a quick second, back to Rockefeller Center and the Nintendo store.
Then we walked up to Central Park. I only stayed for a few minutes before I had to run back to GC to catch the 5 pm train. Man, I can be fast and I know how to get around people in the city, so I made it there in only 15 minutes (google said 25) and got a seat on the train. Shortly after we had left the station, still being inside the tunnel, the train broke down. Oh no!! I was already stretching the hours of Thor being alone at home. We had to wait to go back to station, everybody ran to the new train they had put in but I figured that would be a shit show so I ran to the next train and again was lucky to get a seat (rush hour can be a bit crazy in NYC). Once I was back in Stamford I walked/ran so fast that my legs could barely keep up with my body. I was so sore the next day haha. I wanted to hurry home to Thor before it got dark – I came home about 3 minutes before dark and poor T had been alone for almost 6 hours now (we try to take him out every 4 hours), but he was fine, no accidents. The others came home 1.5 hour later.
It’s supposed to be Times Square in the background, haha, hard to fit everything:)
I always find a building I like for the day in the city:)
Walked by some of the Rockettes Christmas stage decor
And then came Friday. R and A left around 9am – they had a wedding to attend in Philadelphia, that was the whole reason why they came to visit. Our 24 hours of babysitting began. Oh man, if Thor is loud and annoying when we have guests, it is nothing in compare to when we (Jim and I) needs to have full attention on a strange mini version of humans that smells differently and makes interesting sounds (that’s how dogs see it). T had been pretty good the first two days, but that was because R and A was taking care of Becket and also paid some attention to T. Now it was only us and Thor was so jealous. We ended up taking turns, just swapping babies all day long. When B was asleep, I took Thor for a long walk to the park. Once B was awake and J had fed him, I took B for a walk in the stroller. And then back to swap for taking T out again. And the world was quiet and stress free for B’s second nap. And then we started swapping babies again or took them both out for a walk. Puh, what a day:)
Becket and Thor both slept the whole night. I heard the baby making noises a couple of times at night but T was so exhausted he didn’t notice. Becket woke up at 5:30 am. We let him be but he didn’t fall back to sleep so I went to go comfort him. It didn’t work, so I ended up feeding and burping and thought maybe that would do it. But he was screaming bloody murder every time I tried to put him to sleep. I changed his diaper and then J took over and I guess it was just impossible to put him back in his bed so J ended up sitting on the floor with B sleeping in his lap. This was the only tiny bit of struggle we had and it wasn’t that bad:)
At 7am I went to wake them both up and then we had about three hours of trying to keep both babies happy until Ryan and Annelise came back from Philly to pick up the baby and drive home to Cleveland.
Apparently it was fun checking ourselves out in the front phone camera:)
Taking care of Becket was kind of a piece of cake, he is a very happy and easy baby and thank god he didn’t mind Thor barking in his face haha. The hardest part of our babysitting was to calm T down which we failed at. Poor neighbors. Thor is not used to babies, especially not us taking care of them. He’s been around babies before but not for long enough to realize what they are. He was so curious (he gave B lots of kisses on his hands – we tried to have him stay away from the face), but he was also so anxious and of course jealous about his mommy and daddy paying so much attention to this new strange thing called “baby”. We really tried to make T feel that he was still important, we still love him, that he was welcome to say hi to the baby and to make him feel included, but when you only have 24 hours to do all this, it’s not easy. Swapping babies all day was the best thing we could do. We survived, we didn’t go deaf and T didn’t lose his voice completely (only a little haha). J and I was a great team I think, we both trusted each other to do a good job with the baby and we tried to communicate the whole time on what would be best in each situation, plus we had a note/schedule from Annelise to follow, so pretty easy. Victory!
And then the world was quiet again. Aaaahh. Pretty relaxed weekend after that. 
The sunset on Thursday night