Memorial Day’s Weekend in the City

Our typical plan for Memorial Day’s weekend is to go to my wife’s sisters place in Wappinger’s Falls near Poughkeepsie. They have a big backyard and we grill and it’s all good.

But this year my wife’s younger nephew had something like 57 soccer games over the holiday weekend (I exaggerate perhaps, but not by much) so since we would be able to just hang out in the backyard, we decided to just stay in Brooklyn.

The nice thing about the city on a holiday weekend is that it’s unusually quiet. But what to do with the kids for three days?

Saturday: 

Danielle normally has a swim class on Saturday, but obviously it was cancelled. Victoria suffers from classic second child syndrome. She wants to go with Danny for swimming, but she’s too young (except to watch – we want to put her in classes in the fall).

The previous Saturday, Danielle had a birthday party with her best friend that included a sleepover, so I had quality time with Tori. So I took her swimming at our local YMCA, which has a nice pool and family swim on Saturdays. So Danielle decided she wanted to swim with Tori this Saturday. For the record, Danielle is mostly a very good big sister.

So Saturday was a busy day. Swimming, McDonald’s, then our favorite park. That was with me solo while my wife did other errands. Then she met us and we went to the new Shrek movie.

This is kind of funny because Tori loves Shrek. Danielle does not. This is a source of conflict when Tori wants to watch Shrek, which is pretty much always. So Danielle begrudgingly agreed to see this movie (largely because she’s get popcorn, candy and Diet Coke).

If you haven’t seen the latest Shrek, it is not really a movie for 3 year olds. It’s a bit scary at first. The premise is that Shrek is now married with kids and starting to get tired of no longer being a scary ogre. So he’s tricked by Rumpletilskin to give away one day of his life in the past to get one day where everyone is afraid of him in exchange for a random day from his past. Of course Rumplestilskin tricks him and the random day is the day that Shrek was born.

So it turns out that Shrek was never born so he never saved Fiona and apparently that causes her parents to sign over their kingdom to Rumpletilskin (because he tricks them). So you end up with the kingdom gone, Rumplestilskin in charge with witches helping him, rounding up ogres and overall a very scary place. Again, this is not a young kids movie. At the beginning Danielle wanted to go home (but for the record, she hates conflict in pretty much all movies).

So the movie is amusing in that Shrek meets Donkey who has never met him before in a world that is totally messed up. But this is not amusing to a three year old. Of course everything works out at the end, but at the end I had Danielle liking Shrek and Tori not liking Shrek. So if you have young kids, be careful with this movie.

After that we went out to an early dinner at my wife’s favorite Brooklyn sushi joint (my wife eats the best Manhattan sushi, so this means something).

Sunday:

Sunday, we wanted to mix it up a bit. The forecast was for hot so we looked for Manhattan parks with sprinklers. Not that the Brooklyn parks aren’t good, but we go there all the time. So online I found the #2 most recommended "park to travel to" in Timeout New York. This turned out great. It was a very nice park. Danielle made a friend and played with her all day. Tori is so crazy independent that she just went out and played and had a great time. We followed it up with a trip to our favorite local Mexican joint for dinner.

Monday:

Monday the girls weren’t pushing to get out of the apartment but as they got a bit snippy with each other I grabbed them and took them back to our favorite Brooklyn park in the morning. Sometimes you just have to get outside. We always have fun at the park.

There’s a New Orleans style restaurant two doors down from us that just remodeled and changed their name so we’d been thinking about going there. So my wife grabbed the ideal widow table and I brought the gang to meet her. We all ate, my wife and I drank and a very good time was had.

Then the girls wanted to swim again, so again we went to  the YMCA. After that we finally ate a dinner at home and the weekend was done.

Frankly, I was exhausted, but it was a good weekend.