Art, Jewels and Barbecue...

This is a long post - and even so, just a fraction of the fun we've been having in Manhattan!


The famed Bouchon Bakery is strolling distance from our apartment - you can (and should) buy delicious sweets such as rhubarb macarons, incredibly rich, gold-leaf adorned chocolate eclairs, and upmarket versions of such classics as Oreo cookies and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.  We tried several of the goodies on offer, and all were exceptional.  You can also buy foie gras dog biscuits!


The Bouchon Bakery is in the Time Warner building, which is also home to Per Se.  Sadly, we could not dine at Per Se - it's not at all baby-friendly, and we are not comfortable leaving Tabitha with an unknown babysitter.

On Thursday afternoon, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The Met is a spectacular building on 5th Avenue, set back into Central Park.  In the afternoon we had allocated, we could not possibly have hoped to cover even a fraction of the artworks, so we chose to focus on European Paintings, Musical Instruments, Arms and Armour, Egyptian Art and European Sculpture.  I let The Daddy choose our priorities, since I have been to the Met a few times before.


I adore this Van Gough - White Roses:

Look at the oil paints - the textures on their own are mesmerising:

Tabitha seemed to enjoy the ornate frames more than the actual artworks!

I adore Degas' sculptures - La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans is a favourite of mine - in fact, one of my favourite artworks in general.  The sculpture at the Met is one of twenty seven copies - recastings - of the original.  I have photos with this one, taken on two prior visits, and I also have a photograph of myself, aged 8, with another Petite Danseuse at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.  If you are interested, it is a fascinating piece to learn about - revolutionary and controversial in many ways.  This is one place to start reading.

Degas' charcoals are also incredibly beautiful.

I love this painting of Conseulo Vanderbilt with her son:

I had to feed Tabitha while we were in the Met - it is rather nice to sit and feed with a room full of beautiful art to gaze at!


Breastfeeding in the Met, I was in excellent company - here are just a fraction of the many paintings depicting breastfeeding (mostly Mary, but also others):

I adore a certain shade of blue, and this painting features it in abundance - the dresses of the women, not the sky:

After the Met, we wandered around the pretty streets of the Upper East Side.  Some brilliant dog-watching!  I am a massive French Bulldog fan, and this girl is easily the nicest Frenchie I have ever seen in real life.  Her owner was happy for me to snap some photos.  Her legs were incredibly long and graceful:

For dinner, we caught the subway up to Harlem again, to Dinosaur Barbecue, generally acknowledged as the best barbecue in New York.  I would concur wholeheartedly - we both agreed that it was life-alteringly good.  It makes me very, very sad to think that we will not be able to eat Dinosaur Barbecue once we leave New York.


I had a full rack of ribs, with macaroni cheese and bbq beans (plus cornbread, of course!):

The Daddy had a mountain of pulled pork, with curried succotash and a mind-blowingly excellent dish of pureed sweet potato with spiced pecan topping.  He would not stop eating long enough to take a good photo!

The decor was classic Upstate New York Roadhouse:

The following day, we took Tabitha to visit FAO Schwartz.  If she were just a couple of years older, I'm sure the visit would have been hellish ("pleeeease can I have this?!  And this?  And this?") but she really enjoyed herself - lots of cute toys to touch, and other babies to smile at.  She was fond of this oversized puppy toy:

My best friend Amy is a massive Nerds fan.  These nearly-2-kg boxes would be right up her alley.  Disappointingly, however, they are not filled with loose Nerds, but rather with many small packets.  I do not like sour lollies such as Nerds or Fizzoes.  They make my brain hurt!  When I was younger, I used to rinse the outer layers (of Nerds, Fizzoes and the like) off under water, and just crunch on the sweet middle part.

FAO has many, many Pez dispensers.  It was overwhelming!

Also at FAO is a 'make your own Muppet' area.  This was supremely cool -  like 'Build A Bear' but one hundred times more awesome.  There was a big tub labelled 'oversized Muppet noses'!

Some of the doll houses on display were so beautiful - I would happily live in any of them, blown up to real-person size:

How is this Barbie Foosball Table?!  It costs $24,999 plus tax:

There were some gorgeous and glamorous Barbies on display - here are a few of my favourites:

Like the oversized Nerds, FAO is home to other enormous sweet items.  To give you an idea of scale, in the photograph below, the jawbreaker lollies are nearly 1kg each.  The Twizzlers are more than two feet long.  The syrup was taller than Tabitha:

We decided to buy Tabitha a hand-puppet at FAO.  I have wanted to get her a hand-puppet for a while, so this was a good opportunity to buy her a small keepsake.  We lined up all the hand-puppets (over a dozen, including peacocks, dragons, ferrets, rats, puppies, elephants etc), and wiggled them around at her, one at a time.  Without question, the two she loved most of all were a rat and the cat.  Ultimately, she fell in love with the cat - it is sort of an ugly cat, but she squealed and clutched at it with such determined excitement that she appeared to be in pain!!  She really loves her new kitty hand-puppet, cuddling it against her face and body.  Look at the funny expression on her face - joy or pain?!

We then wandered down to the flagship Tiffany & Co. store on 5th Avenue.  I have had the pleasure of shopping at this store a few times before, and it remains one of my favourite places in New York.  I am an enormous fan of the novel, and film, Breakfast at Tiffany's, but beyond that, I simply love being in the beautiful, open spaces, filled with stunning, sparkly jewellery.  The whole place feels calm and slow, as though time moves at a different speed.  Actually, the Sterling Silver jewellery floor in an exception to this - it is generally chaos!  But the other floors - in particular, the baby and homewares floor, and the diamonds floor, are incredibly serene.  We had to go up to level 6, to pick up some items from the personal shopping department, and the views from the quiet lounge area up there, down over 5th Avenue, were just lovely.  Again, a great place to feed Tabitha - a room with a view!


Down on the beautiful diamonds floor, the staff fell in love with Tabitha - for around twenty minutes, a group of half a dozen staff (including the large male manager of the diamond floor) passed around Tabitha, giving her lots of little blue suede pouches to play with, a Tiffany colouring-in card and some special crayons.  She had a ball crawling throughout the massive room, with so much clear, soft-carpeted space.


The staff went to fetch something from 'the vault' for us (wouldn't you LOVE to peek inside the vault?!), and brought us some Champagne and petit fours while we waited - aren't the little cakes just adorable?

They were filled with tiny layers of sponge, cream and jam.  They were truly delicious!

The Daddy bought me a beautiful Schlumberger ring, much to my surprise - and delight!  I have loved the ring for a long time.  I couldn't stop grinning - my cheeks became sore, just like my wedding day.  In fact, our wedding rings came from the 5th Avenue Tiffany store - my mother and sister came to NY just before our wedding, so they picked them up for us.  They were significantly less expensive in the US, compared to Australia, and it is also nice to have them from the flagship store.

Here is Tabitha having a ball crawling all over the diamond floor:

And with her new cat hand-puppet:

One of the Tiffany staffers did not want to let her go!  Tabitha loved playing with her necklace:

We bought this adorable little jewellery box for Tabitha.  It was hand-painted, and features a decorative gold rim, with a gold letter 'T' and a sweet Tortoise:

In contrast to our glamorous afternoon surrounded by jewels, we came home and had more barbecue delivered.  I love the fact that, in New York, you can have pretty much any sort of cuisine delivered to your apartment.  This time, we tried Dallas BBQ.  It was excellent, but not quite as good as Dinosaur, which is the Gold Standard.  We had ribs, pulled pork, baked potatoes with sour cream, buttery rice and cornbread.  There was plenty of extra BBQ sauce.  It was an enormous meal - and cost less than $40 delivered!

We have lots of things planned for the weekend, and then on Tuesday we are moving to our next apartment, in the West Village.  Exciting!