Skipping Town

It was a fun Easter this year. The holidays keep getting more entertaining as Lucia becomes more aware of them, and I know they’ll only get more fun once Greta gets into them, too. This year’s Easter celebration started on Friday, when some friends and I organized an egg hunt for our two-year-olds at the park. Lucia had a great time. While a couple of the other kids preferred to just run around the park, Lucia set out with a singular focus: to collect eggs in her new bunny bucket. She loved finding them; she was less interested in opening them. And, of course, an interesting stick was the best thing of all. Saturday, we went out to Coney Island with friends to play in the sand. Lucia was so excited to be at the beach, and she immediately pulled off her socks and shoes and ran to the water—only to find that it was painfully cold. Once we warmed up her toes and got her shoes back on, she had fun playing in the sand and collecting shells in her bucket. Saturday night, I put together the g...

Andrew and I have celebrated Thanksgiving in a variety of ways over the past five years. In 2007, we cooked a huge meal just for the two of us in our apartment in Sacramento. In 2008, we ate a Zen vegan feast in a small, middle-of-nowhere lodge in Japan. In 2009 and 2010, we ate outside in Napa with the Clarks. And now, for the first time ever, we had Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. Molly and Ian came up for the holiday, and while Molly and I tended to Greta and Lucia, Andrew and Ian prepared our meal. Andrew ambitiously followed a Tom Colecchio turkey recipe and made an amazing dried-cherry-and-pecan stuffing from Cook’s Illustrated; he spent much of the previous evening doing something with turkey necks. This picture illustrates why Andrew, not I, was in charge of the turkey. (Raw turkey skin—ick.) We had Barbra, Chris, and Alex over for the meal as well. Lucia tried a bite or two of squash, two cranberries, half a roll, and a miniscule bite of turkey, as well as some sliced American chees...