Lady Liberty and New York! New York!

 On a whim Theo said Saturday morning, "How about we go to Staten Island and ride the ferry past the Statue of Liberty.".  I was so excited and totally not expecting to go so soon, but we just packed up the kids and jumped in the car.  In less than 2 hours we were boarding the Staten Island Ferry on our way to New York City.

 Pure Awesomeness!

 You can see Lady Liberty in the background as Miriam and Hannah pose.

 Coming up on the city.

 "You're Fired!"  HA!  We decided to walk through the city to the 9/11 Memorial since it was only 1 mile away from the ferry.  We past by the Trump building.

 I was completely amazed by how narrow these roads were!  I'm used to big cities since we would drive through San Francisco often, but I never experienced such TALL buildings so close together that you didn't even have proper lanes!  It just blew me away!  I loved it though, it may sound weird, but with the buildings being so close to one another it actually gave me a homey feeling.  Has anyone ever described NYC as cozy?  LOL!

 This was actually the spot where George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States.  We weren't even looking for it!  How lucky is that!?

We finally came up on the memorial and they have this really neat wall as a reminder and also to honor the firefighters who lost their lives that day.

 I thought this was a cool shot.

Unfortunately they were doing some construction around the Memorial, and you need a ticket to get past that blue wall to the inside.  So this was as close to it as we got. 

Even though we didn't get to actually see the Memorial, just walking around the city and seeing the Statue of Liberty was a dream come true! 

Hopefully our kids will appreciate things like this one day.  I wish I could say how wonderful my kids were, that they were real troopers.  That they knelt beside the Memorial and said a prayer laying a single rose by the fence.  Instead it was me repeating to screaming and whining children, "You're killing my dream kids!".  And what's so funny (and I don't mean in the Ha! Ha! kind of way, more of a going crazy kind of cackle) is that Theo had his long run of 16 miles that morning, and I did 5 and yet our kids were DYING because they had to walk 2 miles.  Not to mention the stops and getting milkshakes from McDonald's, and hitching rides on the double wide stroller.  I was literally dragging Emma along, who was being exceptionally difficult.  But the real kick in the pants was when we got back to port where our car was, these kids whose legs you would think were falling off, were acting like cowgirls and galloping off the ferry.  Theo and I was pulling our hair out to get them to move, making our walk back to the ferry a living nightmare, and now they are flitting around like they were riding on a cloud the whole time we were in the city.  *SIGH*  

 At least this won't be my last trip into the city.  Next time we just may have to get a babysitter, I think we may just be expecting too much from them at this age.  I really hope they get better when they get older since I love to travel and go site seeing.  It just may take some time for that gene to manifest itself in them, at least that's what I'm hoping for.