A Home in Park Slope

After a week of dashing around Brooklyn, we’ve finally found a home; we signed the lease on Friday. It is in Park Slope, just a few blocks from where I used to live, a parlor-level, high-ceilinged apartment in a beautiful brownstone just off of 5th Avenue. It is an ideal place for us: two light-filled, good-sized bedrooms, big kitchen and dining room, character-ful living room, even a small extra room off the hallway whose use we are currently planning.

It was a difficult choice at the end. We’d also found a garden-level apartment on a prime block in Carroll Gardens, another wonderful Brooklyn neighborhood, with a landscaped, private garden in the back in which we could plant vegetables—and in which there was a fig tree. Andrew had found the apartment through a co-worker—it’s not the kind of place that one finds the usual way—and the owners, an Italian couple, offered it to us after a quick meeting without so much as a credit check. But the apartment was dark, as garden-level places are, and we would have had to walk through what would be the baby’s room to get to our bedroom; and so, despite the amazing garden, we chose light and a better floor plan.

Though we’d chosen the Park Slope apartment, it took a bit of convincing for the landlady to choose us. She Googled us after the broker gave her our application, and found this blog—which she said played a role in her decision to have us. Friday afternoon all three of us—Andrew, me, Lucia—met with her, and everything went okay, and we can look forward now to enjoying the lovely apartment in just a few weeks. We’re very excited. We’ll be on the Upper West Side until August 1, and then our Brooklyn life will begin.

It’s such a relief to be able to relax now and enjoy our time here, the apartment search behind us. Today we spent some time walking near the Hudson, looking over our shoulders at the West Side skyline as we made our way out on Pier 1, people-watching and taking in the New Yorkiness of it all: two pianos set up at the end of the pier, at which passersby could sit and play a song; more thousand-dollar strollers than we could count; a woman on a yoga mat doing sun salutations in the midst of the crowds; and our baby, munching on a crispy rice Mum-Mum, looking both happy and sophisticatedly blasé in her new city home.