Sean's Birthday

 When you turn 31, you can't expect much more than dinner and taking out the trash.

... just kidding.  We made more of it the next day by going to a minor league baseball game on Staten Island.  (Actually, Citi Field in Queens is much closer to our home, and that night the Yankees were playing the Mets!  Sounded like a pretty epic experience, but the game would have started too late for Josephine's capabilities, and as you might expect, each ticket was WAY too expensive, especially considering we would have had to bail after a few innings to get her to bed.)

So we trekked via subway, foot, and ferry to watch a Staten Island Yankees game, instead.

Josephine got to see the Statue of Liberty

It was set up to be a pretty great experience.  

(How's that for some foreshadowing?)

  

We enjoyed the journey, and it's a very nice stadium without a bad seat in the house.  Plus, the view from the ballpark was stellar; you could see downtown New York.

Speaking of the view...  I always get a little choked up during the national anthem.  Try listening to it live, somewhere nostalgic like a baseball game, with super-pregnant-hormones raging, and the World Trade Center construction right behind the flags.  There was really no possible way to hold it together.  I tried.  I couldn't.

I was not the only one with internal ragings, though.  These pictures are deceptively calm.  What should have been a perfect little birthday celebration for Sean (Josephine was even the one to request baseball!) actually takes the cake for being the second most publicly disastrous experience we've ever had with Josephine. (I expect that one monstrous tantrum on an airplane when she was two will forever reign as Most Horrid Parenting Experience Ever... but let's not tempt fate.)

Maybe it was a combination of heat and aspects of the journey being overwhelming... and then being relatively confined to a small space with the occasional stroll to tire her more... I don't know.  Maybe just really terrible luck.  Maybe a ploy to make Sean feel double his age and me question the sanity behind having another one of these people growing inside me.

Suffice it to say that being such a VERY long journey away from home did not work in our favor when it came to quelling the tyranny or finding a private place to have her regain composure.  It's not like we haven't had our fair share of public attitude and tantrums, it just takes experiences like this one and that airplane episode to make you EXTREMELY grateful for a car or other quick getaway!

Happy Birthday, tired man.

Ah well.

We survived, although I'm certain the melanin in many of our hair follicles did not.

And while the roughness of the experience hasn't faded completely in the 8 months between the event and me writing this, it's certainly lessened.  I know there will come a day when this memory elicits a chuckle, not our groans, and these pictures make us pine for every last moment with her at this age.
Parenting's SO weird.