We've had a marvelous August so far and have been taking advantage of all that the city has to offer, including parks and pools. We've also been gorging ourselves on so much fresh fruit that sometimes we get a little crazy.
As mentioned earlier, thanks to swimming lessons, a lot of pool time, and much hard work from Kate (and encouragement from me), both kids are now swimming. Can they swim a length of a pool? No. Certainly not. But if they fell into the deep end of a pool, they could both swim the few feet back to the edge.
I've been taking the kids out for a few hours on the weekends to give Kate some time to work. Here we went to some nice stores in Park Slope and then had a picnic and a barefoot race in Prospect Park.
One beautiful Sunday we took the ferry ride to Governor's Island. Here, a celebration of antique (but still working) carousels was taking place. Along with all the other things the Island offers, the kids really enjoyed these as well. (For visitors: GI is a great place, but we do not recommend visiting during the summer. We spent five hours 'in transit to' and 1.5 hours 'enjoying' GI; the ferries only come once an hour but such long lines exist during the summer that you must queue up more than an hour before the ferry you want to take. This could probably be solved by charging a nominal fee ($4?) per ferry passenger, but, alas, NYC wants to keep these ferries free).
