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altarflameI thought we started this day with an ambitious but totally doable agenda: get up at 7:30. Go get Aaron's colored hair spray at the nearest pharmacy. Go to the Empire State Building. Check out Central Park on the way to the Sheraton so Aaron could be there in time for Shake (one of his two dances) to try to prequalify (since it hadn't already won a high gold medal in another city, they would have to get approval to do it at the finale competition).
SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT? Wrong. So very very wrong. Like that Indigo Girls song that goes, I missed ten thousand miles of road I should have seen...
We got up on time, had cereal and fruit from the fridge, and google mapped the nearest pharmacy. It was a little further than I anticipated (we have pharmacies literally 4 to a square mile in many parts of my town) but whatever. I felt surprisingly ok about the hour.
Aaron did not.
But he got over it, and then we started walking a mile or so through area that looked like this:
Everything was closed - apparently SoHo opens between 10 and noon.
Eventually we reached the 3 story, stairs-only CVS, where we learned after thorough exploration that they don't have the colored hair spray like every single CVS, Walgreens, etc does down here in South Florida. They tell us to try Duane Reade a couple of blocks over. So we walk over there, and wouldn't you know it, DR is ALSO 3 stories, stairs only, and after another thorough exploration...doesn't carry it either. They suggest a beauty supply store, and I ask if there's anything like a Hot Topic, and nobody has any idea where anything is and also, most likely, nothing like that is open yet.
We walk back on an adjacent, parallel street, looking for beauty supply or goth-ish stores, and...everything is closed. And none of the places look promising anyway. I text the very helpful and overachieving mom who often brings hair products for Aaron's mohawk to shows on the off chance she might have some colored hair spray or be in a position (as someone with a car) to get him some. No answers or replies.
Finally we sit down on a corner on some stairs and call Grant, even though I am waking him up, and beg him to go on google and find us a place and tell us how to walk there, rather than walking half a mile back to the apt and climbing 3 more flights of stairs to check ourselves. He tells us where to go - it's a little over a mile in a totally different direction. But we 3 way call and they are open, and do carry it, and so I feel like we are at least now walking with purpose.
He gets a lot of attention on his unicycle, I see a lot of interesting things.
(included because of my sister and I reading Trail of Crumbs not long ago.
Finally we arrive at Ricky's NYC, where we can indeed get both green and purple hair spray, as well as some lotion for my FREAKING FEET. Because seriously, they are not happy.
We stop in at Dean and Deluca, next door, which seems to be sort of like a gourmet-er Whole Foods, and I marvel at the mushrooms.
We got a few little tidbits, and headed back to the apartment, and up all the stairs, to eat/drink/regroup (IN AIR CONDITIONING).
Sushi and a cinnamon bun for him, a bread pudding muffin for me, blackberries and Izze to split. It was insanely good.
And this was apparently a big hit - Grant had to open it up for him to look at again many times before we got back <3
There are not really words for this, but I'm going to try ;) Fresh from a local (upstate NY) farm. Like 6 ingredients total. Salty roasted pistachio and honey flavored. !!!!!!!!!!!!
We were both IN LOVE WITH IT.
Google mapping on my laptop, writing down directions to a couple of different directions, and heading back out, without the unicycle this time (as he'd drug it up and down enough staircases for the day) - we rode the subway for the first time. He thought the slide metrocard/go through turnstile thing was so. cool. I have a morbid fear of being pushed/my loved ones being pushed/me or someone else falling from platform edges like that into the path of oncoming trains. THANKS, STEPHEN KING.
We finished up at a place with 3 more flights of stairs up to the street, and maybe I sound like an asshole here but guys? By this point my butt muscles were already hurting to where it sucked to sit down. I am super out of shape but I know I'm not crazy because Aaron was really hating it, too (and I was trying hard to keep up a game face and not make it seem bad).
So we came up, in the Empire State Building part of NYC, which seemed crowded-er and louder and lacking some of the character of SoHo.
After a 20 minute walk, we finally got there, only to find that apparently there is a NINETY MINUTE WAIT to get IN the Empire State Building. This is something I should, obviously, have forseen...in retrospect. Also the cab driver who took us from La Guardia told us it was like $8 or $12 each to go up, he couldn't remember which, when actually it was like $20 and $15 for me and him. So...an hour and a half to spend $35? Neither of us wanted to stand on a high glass balcony THAT bad :/
Back to the subway. When we got off, these were the first street performers we saw. It was good.
Even if it did precede 3 more flights of stairs to get back up to the street *twitch*.
Catching my breath, I looked around and saw a lot of cool shit.
We tossed him a raw almond from my bag :)
This seriously cracks me up.
And here is another part of my ludicrous NYC ignorance: I really thought Central Park was like...a park. Like maybe a city block's worth of park? Really it's FOUR MILES LONG. And like 2 or something wide. It's beautiful, though, I could tell Aaron wanted to stay there for the whole week. He is all nature all the time, at home, going from chickens to cats to spiders to caterpillars. He has habitats with cocoons in them in several windows and catches lightning bugs. As we walked through the city, he kept stopping at potted hibiscus and things to look for caterpillars and it was sort of heartbreaking to try to explain to him that whatever nature was around, was super cultivated and not exactly bug infested...
After walking through the park for about an hour I realized we only had less than an hour to get to the hotel. And I wasn't really SURE sure how long it was gonna take to walk there. And my feet and back and everything were screaming at me to stop fucking walking around. My diastasis/hernia combo make my back feel like I'm about 7 months pregnant pretty much all the time... Then one of those tour busses you sit on top of was stopped by a curb we were passing and the guy was leaning out the door yelling at us, telling us to come in.
Him: Come on, come on, we need riders!
Aaron: Oh man I want to ride on top of a bus!
Me: Do you pass the Sheraton and Towers?
Him: Sheraton, yeah!
Me: Can you get me there by 2?
Him: Definitely, Sheraton is close.
Me: How much is it?
Him: $30 for you, $20 for the boy.
Me: What?! FIFTY DOLLARS? Sorry, no way in the world can I do that. *walking away*
Him: Wait, wait, this is a two hour tour! You go through the whole city!
Me: I can't go through a two hour tour, I have to be to the Sheraton in less than one hour.
Him: It's good for two days when you buy the pass - we could drop you at the Sheraton and then tomorrow you take the tour.
Me: That's great, but I don't have $50 for a bus tour anyway. *more steps, turning away*
Him: You've got Time Square, Union Square, we go over the bridge - *he's following me*
Me: Dude, I don't care, I DON'T HAVE $50 and I have to be somewhere by 2. *clomping off*
Him: *yelling after me* Ok, just the Sheraton - you're only going to the Sheraton?
Me: *turning back enough to nod*
Him: Alright, $10, you can get on.
Me: Ten dollars for BOTH of us?
Him: Yeah. Just tips.
Me: *digging in my purse* Alright!
Can you believe we had to climb a freaking flight of stairs ON THE BUS?!?! Hahaha. Anyway yeah it was cool and I felt like I'd made some kind of deal. Sitting down was heaven at this point.
So we went in the "family bathroom" to get this guy's hair done - GIRLS have an entire auditorium as a Girl's Dressing Room, boys use the bathroom, hmph -
Nerves.
But they did great! On the same giant, screen laden JUMP stage he recognized from Orlando. They totally qualified to be in the big competition.
Timmy is missing from these pics.
He wants to get away from the hectic JUMP area (big groups of dancers in solo or matching costumes, thumping music from the auditorium next door and different music on the screens showing previous performances, booths selling dvd and portrait packages set up everywhere with lines that block the walkways). We ride the subway back to SoHo. On the train, he's depressed, and even teary eyed, saying he wants to go home. I talked about how we only have a few days here, and then once we go home - we're home for good. How long he's looked forward to this. How he'll get homesick sometimes, but then it will fade back again. This helps him a little. (then 3 flights of stairs up to the street)
But these guys help him a lot.
The picture seriously DOES NOT do them justice - they were SO. BIG. When I first saw them I said, "Hey Aaron, I think this guy is walking a couple of bears" and he looked up and was like, WHAT?! I swear you like, can't see the true size here. He pet them a lot - super soft, super gentle, super enormous.
We stopped in at Subway one block over from our place and had subs in silence while he zoned out. Then trudged back to our building, trudged up the to the fourth floor, and collapsed into chairs like zombies.
After awhile I gave him a notebook and pen and he used the rulers there and started drawing. I put my dead camera battery in it's charger, and my dead cell on the charger, and thought about how we still had 2.5 hours of daylight to kill and once we came out of our stupor it was gonna be really boring. So I did more google mapping and asked him what he thought about taking his unicycle out and going to Barnes and Noble, where we could get a book for me to read and a book for me to read to him, and maybe a board game or something. He said whatever was fine with him, so we were off.
It ended up great - the B&N was in Union Square. He LOVED Union Square - a guy juggling knives. Magicians. A fabulous sidewalk chark artist who was blowing our minds by grinding the chalk to dust and then drizzling handfulls of the dust, to make his lines. I cursed my lack of a camera, and after a bit we went in B and N (which had escalators! ESCALATORS! I told him, Aaron, I may have to divorce your Dad to marry an escalator). We ended up getting Spades (cards) and a couple of paperbacks and THEN! On our way out.
Breakdancers!!!!!!
Amazing breakdancers doing the kind of shit I have just never seen in my life. Defying physics. If you search YouTube for Union Square breakdancers, you can find videos galore of them. This was probably one of the top ten events of Aaron's life :p
And we went down the subway, and saw a guy playing Amazing Grace on the accordion, and felt like NY is kind of awesome in some ways, and went home, after getting slightly lost and walking too far, to where the stairs were not awesome, and took showers, after which we both said those were like the best showers that had ever occured in history. Lotion on feet, cans of soup, and basically falling down unconscious.
The next day the convention really began, and I was glad to note on the deli downstairs' menu that they had a lot of cheap breakfast options, delivered free <3
SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT? Wrong. So very very wrong. Like that Indigo Girls song that goes, I missed ten thousand miles of road I should have seen...
We got up on time, had cereal and fruit from the fridge, and google mapped the nearest pharmacy. It was a little further than I anticipated (we have pharmacies literally 4 to a square mile in many parts of my town) but whatever. I felt surprisingly ok about the hour.
Aaron did not.
But he got over it, and then we started walking a mile or so through area that looked like this:
Everything was closed - apparently SoHo opens between 10 and noon.
Eventually we reached the 3 story, stairs-only CVS, where we learned after thorough exploration that they don't have the colored hair spray like every single CVS, Walgreens, etc does down here in South Florida. They tell us to try Duane Reade a couple of blocks over. So we walk over there, and wouldn't you know it, DR is ALSO 3 stories, stairs only, and after another thorough exploration...doesn't carry it either. They suggest a beauty supply store, and I ask if there's anything like a Hot Topic, and nobody has any idea where anything is and also, most likely, nothing like that is open yet.
We walk back on an adjacent, parallel street, looking for beauty supply or goth-ish stores, and...everything is closed. And none of the places look promising anyway. I text the very helpful and overachieving mom who often brings hair products for Aaron's mohawk to shows on the off chance she might have some colored hair spray or be in a position (as someone with a car) to get him some. No answers or replies.
Finally we sit down on a corner on some stairs and call Grant, even though I am waking him up, and beg him to go on google and find us a place and tell us how to walk there, rather than walking half a mile back to the apt and climbing 3 more flights of stairs to check ourselves. He tells us where to go - it's a little over a mile in a totally different direction. But we 3 way call and they are open, and do carry it, and so I feel like we are at least now walking with purpose.
He gets a lot of attention on his unicycle, I see a lot of interesting things.
(included because of my sister and I reading Trail of Crumbs not long ago.
Finally we arrive at Ricky's NYC, where we can indeed get both green and purple hair spray, as well as some lotion for my FREAKING FEET. Because seriously, they are not happy.
We stop in at Dean and Deluca, next door, which seems to be sort of like a gourmet-er Whole Foods, and I marvel at the mushrooms.
We got a few little tidbits, and headed back to the apartment, and up all the stairs, to eat/drink/regroup (IN AIR CONDITIONING).
Sushi and a cinnamon bun for him, a bread pudding muffin for me, blackberries and Izze to split. It was insanely good.
And this was apparently a big hit - Grant had to open it up for him to look at again many times before we got back <3
There are not really words for this, but I'm going to try ;) Fresh from a local (upstate NY) farm. Like 6 ingredients total. Salty roasted pistachio and honey flavored. !!!!!!!!!!!!
We were both IN LOVE WITH IT.
Google mapping on my laptop, writing down directions to a couple of different directions, and heading back out, without the unicycle this time (as he'd drug it up and down enough staircases for the day) - we rode the subway for the first time. He thought the slide metrocard/go through turnstile thing was so. cool. I have a morbid fear of being pushed/my loved ones being pushed/me or someone else falling from platform edges like that into the path of oncoming trains. THANKS, STEPHEN KING.
We finished up at a place with 3 more flights of stairs up to the street, and maybe I sound like an asshole here but guys? By this point my butt muscles were already hurting to where it sucked to sit down. I am super out of shape but I know I'm not crazy because Aaron was really hating it, too (and I was trying hard to keep up a game face and not make it seem bad).
So we came up, in the Empire State Building part of NYC, which seemed crowded-er and louder and lacking some of the character of SoHo.
After a 20 minute walk, we finally got there, only to find that apparently there is a NINETY MINUTE WAIT to get IN the Empire State Building. This is something I should, obviously, have forseen...in retrospect. Also the cab driver who took us from La Guardia told us it was like $8 or $12 each to go up, he couldn't remember which, when actually it was like $20 and $15 for me and him. So...an hour and a half to spend $35? Neither of us wanted to stand on a high glass balcony THAT bad :/
Back to the subway. When we got off, these were the first street performers we saw. It was good.
Even if it did precede 3 more flights of stairs to get back up to the street *twitch*.
Catching my breath, I looked around and saw a lot of cool shit.
We tossed him a raw almond from my bag :)
This seriously cracks me up.
And here is another part of my ludicrous NYC ignorance: I really thought Central Park was like...a park. Like maybe a city block's worth of park? Really it's FOUR MILES LONG. And like 2 or something wide. It's beautiful, though, I could tell Aaron wanted to stay there for the whole week. He is all nature all the time, at home, going from chickens to cats to spiders to caterpillars. He has habitats with cocoons in them in several windows and catches lightning bugs. As we walked through the city, he kept stopping at potted hibiscus and things to look for caterpillars and it was sort of heartbreaking to try to explain to him that whatever nature was around, was super cultivated and not exactly bug infested...
After walking through the park for about an hour I realized we only had less than an hour to get to the hotel. And I wasn't really SURE sure how long it was gonna take to walk there. And my feet and back and everything were screaming at me to stop fucking walking around. My diastasis/hernia combo make my back feel like I'm about 7 months pregnant pretty much all the time... Then one of those tour busses you sit on top of was stopped by a curb we were passing and the guy was leaning out the door yelling at us, telling us to come in.
Him: Come on, come on, we need riders!
Aaron: Oh man I want to ride on top of a bus!
Me: Do you pass the Sheraton and Towers?
Him: Sheraton, yeah!
Me: Can you get me there by 2?
Him: Definitely, Sheraton is close.
Me: How much is it?
Him: $30 for you, $20 for the boy.
Me: What?! FIFTY DOLLARS? Sorry, no way in the world can I do that. *walking away*
Him: Wait, wait, this is a two hour tour! You go through the whole city!
Me: I can't go through a two hour tour, I have to be to the Sheraton in less than one hour.
Him: It's good for two days when you buy the pass - we could drop you at the Sheraton and then tomorrow you take the tour.
Me: That's great, but I don't have $50 for a bus tour anyway. *more steps, turning away*
Him: You've got Time Square, Union Square, we go over the bridge - *he's following me*
Me: Dude, I don't care, I DON'T HAVE $50 and I have to be somewhere by 2. *clomping off*
Him: *yelling after me* Ok, just the Sheraton - you're only going to the Sheraton?
Me: *turning back enough to nod*
Him: Alright, $10, you can get on.
Me: Ten dollars for BOTH of us?
Him: Yeah. Just tips.
Me: *digging in my purse* Alright!
Can you believe we had to climb a freaking flight of stairs ON THE BUS?!?! Hahaha. Anyway yeah it was cool and I felt like I'd made some kind of deal. Sitting down was heaven at this point.
So we went in the "family bathroom" to get this guy's hair done - GIRLS have an entire auditorium as a Girl's Dressing Room, boys use the bathroom, hmph -
Nerves.
But they did great! On the same giant, screen laden JUMP stage he recognized from Orlando. They totally qualified to be in the big competition.
Timmy is missing from these pics.
He wants to get away from the hectic JUMP area (big groups of dancers in solo or matching costumes, thumping music from the auditorium next door and different music on the screens showing previous performances, booths selling dvd and portrait packages set up everywhere with lines that block the walkways). We ride the subway back to SoHo. On the train, he's depressed, and even teary eyed, saying he wants to go home. I talked about how we only have a few days here, and then once we go home - we're home for good. How long he's looked forward to this. How he'll get homesick sometimes, but then it will fade back again. This helps him a little. (then 3 flights of stairs up to the street)
But these guys help him a lot.
The picture seriously DOES NOT do them justice - they were SO. BIG. When I first saw them I said, "Hey Aaron, I think this guy is walking a couple of bears" and he looked up and was like, WHAT?! I swear you like, can't see the true size here. He pet them a lot - super soft, super gentle, super enormous.
We stopped in at Subway one block over from our place and had subs in silence while he zoned out. Then trudged back to our building, trudged up the to the fourth floor, and collapsed into chairs like zombies.
After awhile I gave him a notebook and pen and he used the rulers there and started drawing. I put my dead camera battery in it's charger, and my dead cell on the charger, and thought about how we still had 2.5 hours of daylight to kill and once we came out of our stupor it was gonna be really boring. So I did more google mapping and asked him what he thought about taking his unicycle out and going to Barnes and Noble, where we could get a book for me to read and a book for me to read to him, and maybe a board game or something. He said whatever was fine with him, so we were off.
It ended up great - the B&N was in Union Square. He LOVED Union Square - a guy juggling knives. Magicians. A fabulous sidewalk chark artist who was blowing our minds by grinding the chalk to dust and then drizzling handfulls of the dust, to make his lines. I cursed my lack of a camera, and after a bit we went in B and N (which had escalators! ESCALATORS! I told him, Aaron, I may have to divorce your Dad to marry an escalator). We ended up getting Spades (cards) and a couple of paperbacks and THEN! On our way out.
Breakdancers!!!!!!
Amazing breakdancers doing the kind of shit I have just never seen in my life. Defying physics. If you search YouTube for Union Square breakdancers, you can find videos galore of them. This was probably one of the top ten events of Aaron's life :p
And we went down the subway, and saw a guy playing Amazing Grace on the accordion, and felt like NY is kind of awesome in some ways, and went home, after getting slightly lost and walking too far, to where the stairs were not awesome, and took showers, after which we both said those were like the best showers that had ever occured in history. Lotion on feet, cans of soup, and basically falling down unconscious.
The next day the convention really began, and I was glad to note on the deli downstairs' menu that they had a lot of cheap breakfast options, delivered free <3
