Our Apartment

So I finally cleaned up our apartment nice enough to take some pictures of it, haha it only took me 5 weeks!

Our living room/dining room:




Our Kitchen with cool stainless steel appliances & granite countertops:


Our own washer/dryer (hard thing to find around here):


Our bathroom:


Blake, Amy's and...


Jaylee's room

Yes she does sleep in the closet, but we keep one door open and keep a fan going so hopefully it doesn't count as child abuse.

Some of our views from our apartment:

We looked it up and apparently those two tall buildings are called the Silver Towers and they are apartment complexes that cost over $4,600 a month for a one bedroom/one bathroom apartment...Seriously?!


Sorry don't mind the bird poop, we can't clean it off...Dang birds ruin our views


This huge office building that blocks most of our view. It blocks all the cool buildings like the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, but we are just grateful to have some views of Manhattan.


That's the view looking down from our apartment on the 26th floor

A Mommy Moment

Blake has long days of class on Tuesday and Wednesday and so it is mostly just Jaylee and I all day. Most days I realize that I worry Jaylee is bored with me and so I try to find things to do for her. I guiltily look forward to nap times where I can have a moment to myself to shower or be get some things around the house done. Usually when I hear her start to wake up I think oh no just sleep a little bit longer. It was on one of these long days when she was starting to wake up from her nap that I had the same thought of oh man I wish she would stay asleep when I realized something...I needed to be grateful for the time I have with her in this stage that she was in now because it wouldn't last very long. I realized she had already grown up too fast and I wanted to slow down time to keep her little forever. I decided right then and there to be excited and I ran in our room (she sleeps in our closet haha) and showed her that I was excited she was awake. I wish you could have seen her face, it was a mixture of my mom has gone crazy and the thought of I kind of like this craziness. We spent the rest of the day dancing, running, reading, jumping on the bed and other crazy stuff. She helped me make dinner...eggs her favorite...and I gave her her little bowl and she walked right up to our table and put her bowl there and said "UP". She sat on her own chair ( we are going through the independent stage right now) and we ate dinner together. It was a fun night and when Blake got home after we put her to bed I started telling him about how cute Jaylee had been that day and I broke down into tears! Blake just laughed and started crying too and we both talked about how big she was getting. So now I try to make everyday count, and enjoy every moment I get with her and Blake
.
Oh P.S. the day after this great mommy moment day, Jaylee was jumping on the bed and she fell off and bonked her head...on the nightstand...not a good mommy moment. Dang I guess we all have good and bad days!

River front views

We live really close to the Hudson River and they have a nice walk way that goes along the river. These are the cool views that we have of the Manhattan strip.




The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building




This is the new "One World Trade Center" also known as the freedom tower. When it is completed it will be the tallest building in America and the third tallest building in the world. It will have 105 floors and be 1,776 ft. tall. At night it is lit up with the colors red, white and blue.

The Manhattan Temple and Central Park

So we haven't had much luck with going to church while here in New Jersey because our ward has been cancelled due to the hurricane and clean up efforts going on. We have been here for over 4 weeks and have yet to meet our new ward. The whole stake is providing "helping hands" service to those areas which were hit hard by the hurricane, and since we don't know anyone and don't have a car it has been hard for us to know what to do. We decided after missing church for 3 weeks in a row we really needed to go somewhere so we decided to go to the ward that meets in the Manhattan Temple. We got there and found out that they were having a single adult regional area meeting...are you serious?! We decided to sit in on their sacrament meeting anyway and of coarse we were the only ones who had a kid. Haha it was pretty funny, at least Jaylee entertained the single adults that were around us. We are really hoping that we will be able to go to our ward soon!



The temple is right next to Central Park so we decided to head over there after sacrament meeting and walk around for a bit. It was pretty crazy to think that they had this patch of foresty area right in the middle of all these tall office buildings. It was really neat to walk around and see all the different things they had going on there, and it was also fun to watch all the different types of wackos too. I should have brought other shoes to wear while walking around though cuz my church shoes gave me blisters!

My own Playground

We have a cute little playground on the 12th floor of our apartment complex and Jaylee loves it because it is small enough that she can do everything all by her self. She climbs right up the stairs and goes down the slide with no help! It's nice because I can just sit and relax while I watch her play. It has these cute little windows that she loves to look out of and play peekaboo with me, it's really cute.

Elephants

Last week Jaylee and I walked Blake to the subway and I decided to explore the area down by the riverfront. We found this cute courtyard that had elephants with water squirting out of their trunks and around their feet. I was excited because it was a pretty warm afternoon and thought Jaylee would love running around getting wet. She was a little hesitant at first and didn't really want to touch the water until she saw this little boy running around getting soaked. She thought it was hilarious and joined right in!


"It's a little cold...not sure I want to get in"

"Still not quite sure..."

"Let's jump right in!"
She stood like this for at least 5 minutes haha

Crayon Corner

So our apartment complex has a great kids room that has toys, music, books, little table and chairs and a tv. Jaylee loves this room and gets excited when we get to go. The first time I went with her there were about 3 other kids and she loved watching them but didn't want them to come too close or to play with the toys she was playing with (we are still working on the sharing thing). The other times we have been it has just been us and she loves the fact that she can do whatever she wants.

September 11th

Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of September 11th and being here made it special. They had a big ceremony and opened up the memorial they built to honor the world trade centers. We didn't go to the ceremony because we knew it would be crowded and security was on high alert. But we were able to see these things being across the river


They had planes flying around with American flags all day.


Each year on the anniversary of September 11th they shine lights representing where the twin towers stood. It shone from dusk to dawn.

Braves game

So I am starting to think that Blake chose to go to NYU not only because it is the top ranked in the tax masters program, but also because there are things like the US open and the Braves game that he has always wanted to go to. So we fulfilled his dreams of going and went. The Braves were suppose to play the weekend we got here but due to the hurricane the games were cancelled and rescheduled for a double header. Wow two games for the price of one, who thought we would be that lucky;) We got there right in time to see his favorite player, Chipper Jones, hit a home run! It was awesome.

The US Open

So we knew that the US Open would be in New York when we moved here and we thought that it would be totally awesome if we went to it, so we did! We actually went to the Us Open park on Saturday to see if we could get lucky and buy some tickets from someone but they had signs that said no scalping tickets within 1500 ft. of the area and the seats at the box office were sold out. We did talk to someone who told us to call TicketsNow, so we did and found a pretty great deal on a couple of tickets for the night session on labor day. We were a little nervous cuz we knew we had to take Jaylee and it could get pretty late but we decided it was a once in a lifetime chance and we shouldn't pass it up.
The day session ended up going long so our session, which was suppose to start at 7, didn't start until 8:30. We got to see Wozniacki's (#1 women's player) match first and it ended up being 3 hours long so we didn't get to the men's match until 11:30. We were thinking there was no way that Jaylee would last but we decided to go as long as she was doing okay. She turned out to be a champ and actually loved being there! She loved to clap, cheer and dance with the crowd and loved watching/talking to the people around us. Everyone loved her!
Blake's dream came true and we were able to watch Roger Federer play. It was awesome! He crushed his opponent which was good because his match was only about an hour and a half long, but it was about 1:40am at this point and we still had to make it home. It ended up taking us two hours to get home because we had to wait for the trains which not running as much because it was so late/early AHHH! Oh well that's the price you pay when you do something crazy like that.