NYC Thanksgiving!

As you can tell from this picture, our Thanksgiving was a bit different this year! The day before Thanksgiving, we flew to NYC. (Also Jackson turned 8 months old and cut his first tooth) I was terrified that he would be awful on the plane because of his teething fussiness but he turned out just fine. We took the train into the city where we met up with my family. Since Ben and Paige live in up-state New York, my parents and Steven had flown from AZ to Ithaca and they all drove down together.

When planning this trip months ago, we learned that hotels in NYC are expensive, and hotels in NYC on Thanksgiving are crazy expensive! Luckily Tyler had earned tons of points from all his hotel stay while traveling around Florida so we were able to stay at the Crowne Plaza hotel right off Times Square. It was so awesome to be right in the middle of it all!

It was so dang cold! We had to bundle up Jackson for the first time in his life – I don’t think he liked it too much…

Our first night we went over to Central Park, watched the balloons get filled up for the Parade, checked out Rockefeller Square and got some Ray’s Pizza.

Too bad they didn't light the tree until the next week!!

The next day was Thanksgiving and we were so excited to watch the parade and even more excited that it wasn’t raining as the forecast had initially predicted! Tyler went out early to try to save a spot but he realized it wasn’t worth it since so many people were out there already. We went out a couple hours later and got lucky though! Paige, Ben Tyler and Steven were able to stand right behind the barricades on 55th St. and 7th Ave. Since I had a sleeping Jackson in the stroller, my parents and I had to stay back next to the building behind them, but we scored a nice planter box to stand on and could see everything.

Here are the lucky front row kids.

And the view from their spot ...

I took this pic from our spot, not quite as up close, but still pretty awesome.

Jackson woke up about 30 minutes into the parade and wondered what all the commotion was about!

Near the end of the parade Jackson was getting a little restless so we headed back to our hotel and watched the last few floats from up there.

We saw the Dough Boy just as we were starting to head back!

It was cool that we were able to see it from our room (we had requested that in case it was raining) but I’m glad we went on the street to see it up close and personal! The glare is kinda bad, but that's Santa down there!

Jackson and Grammy watching from our room.

Another random note – while we were looking for a spot to watch the parade we ran into Sarah Simmons (Morris) and her husband Calvin! Of all the millions of people we found them, it was so awesome. We ended up having them over at our hotel later that day and even saw them in the Manhattan Temple on Saturday.

I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t get to have a good Thanksgiving Feast but we got to have the traditional feast at the Film Center Cafe... with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry, and pumpkin pie!

The next day was my mom's 50th birthday, the real reason for the trip, and of course it was Black Friday.

We did some crazy shopping and started at Macys. I didn’t realize how accurate the Elf movie was about getting the department store all ready for Santa! It was crazy how intense they made the 7^th floor! It was pretty neat that Jackson’s first time meeting Santa was at this famous place.

We went to a few other shops after Macy’s, and wow – probably the most crowded I’ve seen stores. I’m not usually a Black Friday shopper, but in NYC, you couldn’t pass it up!

Later that night we went to West Side Story and were able to have the lovely Melanie Layman (Bothwell) watch Jackson for the evening.

The play was great and we had the songs stuck in our head the next few days, especially Steven with "MARIA!"

The next morning we went to the Manhattan Temple, did a little more sight seeing in Times Square and then headed out!

My family drove back up to Ithaca and Tyler, Jackson and I drove up to Boston!

A memorable Thanksgiving for sure!! It’s too bad Michael wasn’t able to be with us, but we’re proud that he’s doing so great on his LDS Mission. The only random part is that he was just a few hours north of where we were, in Utica, New York. He freaked out when he heard we were all there. (We didn’t tell him we were going)