The Nook Does New York: Day 3

Okay. Day 3: Friday. 

We stayed at this bed and breakfast called the Fontainebleau Inn, which is also where the wedding and the reception took place. It was built in 1814 (see, that's one of things I miss about the East Coast - history! Nothing in Idaho was built in 1814 except maybe a few trees) and is very beautiful.

We woke up about 6:30 a.m. and I decided to go take a walk on the grounds and get some photos in. It was BEAUTIFUL outside. A perfect fall morning, and too early for the humidity to hit yet in full. (New York is gorgeous and has a lot of great things going for it, but the one thing I could not STAND was the humidity. Ugh! Us mountain folk are just not bred for that sort of business, I tell you! Our lungs aren't built to filter water! And our hair is already prone enough towards frizziness as it is, thank you, without being buoyed up to the point of fro-ism by the insane amount of airborne moisture! ...Or maybe it's just me! Exclamation point!!!)

Before I went outside I admired the sleeping babies, who every morning are just so cute in bed that I can barely stand it.

 

I then commenced my walk. Most of the pics I took can be found here , but here are a few more:

The Fontainebleau Inn, front and back

Left: The driveway as seen from the second floor. Right: View of the lake from our bedroom, through panes of very romantic and historical looking hand-blown glass.

The study. I LOOOOVE this room. Someday I will have a room in my house like this. Only with more books. And I'd probably ditch the boat, and go with something cooler to put on the mantel. Like, I don't know, a big porcelain figurine of a rooster, or a big jar filled decoratively with colorful beans in layers, or something. Um, yeah. That. ...Okay, so I may need to think a little harder on what my dream study would look like. I'll get back to you on that.

Breakfast after my walk was lovely, served on the back deck in the sunlight and involving a large quantity of delicious food.Though the wedding party and some of the guests all stayed at the inn for the rest of the weekend, that first night and morning we had it all to ourselves, and it was peaceful and relaxing and entirely enjoyable.

Breakfast

Random picture from breakfast that I adore. (Of course, at the time I was thinking, "Oh great, not another one..." in reference to the fact that Max is obsessed with grabbing, holding, twirling, and playing with my hair and it drives me bonkers most of the time and I swore that neither this nor any other child would be allowed to develop that habit. Of course the kid can't even control her arms yet and somehow manages to find my poor, abused locks.. Sigh. It's things like this that are turning my hair gray at the ripe old age of twenty three, as you can see in the picture!)

Holy Mongo Targets, Batman! You could fit a Costco in there!

After breakfast, Todd, Ginni (Todd's mom) and I drove into Ithaca to get various last-minute articles of wedding clothing for everyone. It was here that I saw and visited The Biggest Target I Have Ever Seen. Granted, my only experience of Target up to this point in my life is the one in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which is pretty darned small. But regardless, this was all very exotic and exciting. This Target even had a GROCERY STORE inside. With produce, and everything. And an electronics department. Amazing! It's like Super WalMart, only with more soccer moms and less obese people wearing stained sweatpants and tiny spaghetti strap shirts with no bra. Of course, since this is New York and not Idaho, the soccer moms came in a variety of colors, which was also quite exotic. Racial and cultural diversity: another thing I miss about the East Coast! Anyway. After Target we discovered that we'd accidentally packed only Max diapers in the diaper bag and no Catherine diapers, so of course we ran out of Catherine diapers since she requires a new one approximately every seven minutes and had to improvise a solution:

How To Make A Size 5 Diaper Fit A Newborn: (I should write an entire one of those DIY posts on this!) The trick is to roll the front of the diaper (which goes pretty much up to her chest) alllll the way down, over and over, and then fasten it in place by crossing the velcro pieces over each other tightly. Works like a charm!

  Max took the photo of Catherine wearing his diaper. ...Just kidding. He did get to play with Nana's camera for awhile, though, which he thought was great fun.

 

When we got back to the inn, I worked on blog stuff for awhile and then Todd and Baby C took a nap before he and Max, who were both in the wedding, had to walk up to the chapel on the inn's grounds for the rehearsal.

 

After the rehearsal, we headed out for Taughannock State Park, where the rehearsal dinner was held. It was a beautiful evening and not humid at all. The dinner was in an enclosed pavilion on the shores of Cayuga Lake. Max fell asleep in the car right before we got there and, hoping to let him get a longer nap in, we put on our Amazing Super Tricky Improvisation Hats for the second time that day and found a bed for him to sleep in:

 

This time the roles were reversed, however: instead of putting something of Max's on Baby C, we used something of Baby C's to contain Max. Having two kids is great!!! You always have a backup of whatever you need, even if the sizes are a little different!

My father in law is a brewer (have I mentioned how excited I am to be going to live with him? I am planning to make him teach me everything he knows), and he and his brewing partner brewed a beer for the wedding. They brewed a beer for our wedding, too, way back when (I love making myself sound all old like that), which was a delicious rye ale called Rye Not. For their wedding, Jake and Nora wanted an ESB (Extra Special Bitter, a style of ale with toasty, fruity malt notes and more assertive hops flavor than your standard ale - it isn't actually bitter, but very balanced), so my FIL, his brew buddy, and the buddy's son came up with one they called ESBG - "Extra Special Bride and Groom." It was so delicious that I've written an entire paragraph about it that is significantly longer than many of the other paragraphs in this post. I cannot WAIT to start brewing beer. Oh man.

Frosty, homebrewed ESB. Splendid!

After the rehearsal dinner festivities, which involved a lot of fun socializing, good food, and speeches about how brewing a good beer is a metaphor for brewing a good marriage (...or vice versa... haha), we headed back to the inn and crashed for the night.

On to Day 4: Some spontaneous adventuring and of course the big event we came to New York for in the first place!