Well, that's just embarassing.

Oops. I don't think I've written anything since I was reminded by one of the three people who still check on this thing in November. Terrible performance on my part. Yet I soldier on. We're back to real life after a week or so on a trek through News Jersey and York.

First thing we did after spending one night in NJ was to head right back north to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Every Christmas, they construct a model of the city, complete with trains, out of sticks and leaves from the garden. Plus, it is warm and humid, which is nice in December. Max was entranced by the train shaped like a ladybug and also by his cousin's french fries. I forgot the camera, though.

The next day we bundled up - not all of us, actually, just my dad and I and brother-in-law, Marc - and went to hopefully watch history not be made at Giants Stadium. By now you either know the story or could not care less, and all I have to say about the experience are these three things:
1. A night football game means too many hours of drinking for most Giants fans. The parking lot looked like something from an apocalypse movie, with open fires and broken glass and bands of surly men.

2. Warm weather is better than cold for football spectating.

3. Undefeated rhymes with cheated.

Before the game we went out to a nice Spanish restaurant in the Ironbound section of Newark. Marc made the mistake of trying to order a salad in place of his soup and we got the stinkeye from the waiter all night. I reversed this by ordering chipirones, tiny squid that the waiter very much approved of, but he still hung around our table in a menacing way. On the way home, we dodged the aforementioned glass and fire and still spent nearly an hour getting out of the parking lot.

I did not bring a camera to this event, either.

The next day we drove into New York to visit Angela and Matt and their lovely daughter, Sofia, in Washington Heights, which seems to be one of the easiest parts of New York to drive to from New Jersey. A delight, except for the bridge traffic, which made a one hour trip twice as long. It was at their apartment that I experienced the weirdness and wonderfulness that is the Nintendo Wii. Matt is an aficionado of video games and has this thing carefully hooked up to a ginormous flat screen television that he describes as his "midwestern giveaway" since it is required to allow Michiganders to continue to view Big 10 sports at the same scale as they appear in Michigan.

The Wii has the funny joysticks that respond to movements as if they were bats, racquets, or golf clubs. So to play, you stand up, run around, swing your bat, whatever. Yes, you can get hurt, yes, you do break a sweat, and yes, it has wrist straps so you don't throw the controller at the tv by accident. Yes, I was sore the next day. From playing a video game. This was big big fun. The next day, we even found one of Max's boots that had fallen out on Fort Washington Avenue, the main drag. We didn't even know we had dropped it, and the night of rain had made it very lovely to pick up. But we don't have to buy new boots, and that's the important thing. I remember thinking that the wet, forlorn boot in the street would make a good picture, but the camera was packed away for this trip. You'll have to imagine the boot, people, and Wii.

New Year's Eve Day came and we headed over to Peter and Paget and Emma's in Brooklyn. This time, we took the camera out of the bag. Max made himself at home right away by commandeering Emma's fairy wand and doing some excellent fairying. The two of them turned out to be peas in a pod, as Emma is motherly in that way that 4-year old girls can be, and Max is an attention hog in that way 2-year old boys can be. Symbiosis.

First we had a cocktailish party for parents and kids. My sister and her family joined us; they were visiting other friends in the area. This sort of blew Max's mind, since he was just getting used to not seeing his regular folk and settling into the every-night-a-new-bed thing. As we always do when we make plans with PP and E, our sense of time ran to the fantastical and we were cleaning up from the party and starting dinner at around 10. It had been planned to end earlier, but one man drank a little too much and cornered me with tales from the book he was writing. He was a nebbishly little guy with a midwestern accent and started me off by telling me it was a novel about a Jewish man from Chicago in a terrible marriage with a Muslim woman from a small central Asian republic. "Where's your wife from?" I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

"My ex-wife, the bitch, is from Kyrgyztan," he said, slugging a full paper cup of Prosecco, coughing, and adding, "I shouldn't get so drunk, since I have to push the stroller 20 blocks when we go." His five-year old daughter was playing with Emma's toys across the room, perhaps trying not to notice that everyone else had gone home. Luckily, Max and Leah were keeping the party going with fancy wear and party horns. Extra luckily, the pork roast was quietly brining on the front steps. Just another night in the city with meat on your steps. After walking me through 600 pages of dysfunctional boringness, the man realized that his daughter was trying to sleep on the rug and headed out. "I think he has Asperger's Syndrome," said Peter. "No, really." "Thank you," I said.

Peter then cooked us dinner as quickly as he could, and it was excellent. Potatoes were flipped in a huge skillet. I have always wanted to flip things like this, but it usually ends in a mess for me. Not for Peter. And then they came out crunchy. Everyone's favorite flavor. We finished dinner at 11:55, ran up to the roof, and ended the night with fireworks in three directions. Happy new year.