On Nannies.

New York mommies can be a strange breed (at least strange ie different or out of the norm of what I know in the South). Where Southern counterparts may spend their child-rearing days quitting their jobs to mommy full time 'til their nests someday empty, New York mommies often return to work full-time immediately, weeks after bringing new life into the world, and employing full-time help to do a great bulk of the child-rearing in their absence. We've all heard of the Nanny Diaries, the pseudo-autobiographical tale of a Nanny who looks after a wealthy family's children. What I didn't fully realize was how widespread this Nanny culture was in the city, not only in Manhattan but in other upwardly mobile burroughs like Brooklyn.

In certain neighborhoods you can walk down the street and nearly every stroller you pass is being pushed by a nanny. A southern transplant I know here who recently had a baby told me she has women coming up to her at least once a week offering their full-time nanny services, and asking her, "Why don't you have a nanny?" (her baby is 8 weeks old). Her husband's coworkers want to know why they don't have help and were astonished when he took time off after the baby was born. Not only are nannies a normal thing here, but they feel the same way about people not having nannies as many southerners probably feel about having them! Some have explained that these New York mommies really feel that going back to work full-time is the best thing for their child, because in the long term it offers them more opportunities and benefits monetarily.

On the one hand I can see the logic of that argument but I have to tell you, having daily contact with a variety of nannies around the city, I find some of the trends in the hiring of these nanny populations to be very curious. Now, some elite families are adamant about their child being bi or tri-lingual, so you see a lot of hispanic, chinese, and caribbean style nannies (although I'm not sure what language the caribbean nannies are imparting on their children--some variety of patois, perhaps?) This is all good and well, but having spent six or so years working on behavior and language with language-delayed and autistic children (the same principles apply for typically developing children) I have to wonder what other skills these children may be missing out on. For example, the other day I was watching a child, and a nanny was standing nearby me. The child I was watching took a swing at the nanny's kid and grazed him upside the head. The child began to cry and the nanny (who had been chatting on her cell phone, a popular pastime of nanny's while children are off playing with very minimal supervision) came and scooped up her kid and said, "the next time a kid hits you, you hit them right back!" Great advice, lady! Granted this child was very young and not yet talking in complete sentences. Still, it took everything I had not to go up to this nanny and ask her what in the $%^& she thought she was doing.

You can go round and round about it: if you're going to hire someone to essentially raise your young child and be one of the main examples the child has for how to behave and speak, and if you are really in a position to pay someone to help you full-time, why not hire someone with a college education or higher degree? I mean if you're going to spend the money on something wouldn't you want it to be your child? I may be making generalizations here but it would seem an educated person is more likely to have read or be willing to read up on parenting strategies (which is a lot of what nannying is) and know the importance of one-on-one playtime, and less likely to tell your kid, "when a kid hits you, hit them back" while talking on their cell phone. But all this hiring out of childcare to other parties who seem minimally interested in your child's development (which would be at the top of my list when and if I was ever in the position to hire such a person) begs the question: if no one has the time or inclination, then why are you having children at all?! Does anyone have any insight into this? Is it to carry on the Van der blah blah family name or because you don't fully realize how critical the first few years of life are to development or what?

On a somewhat unrelated sidenote, I applied to a handful of Nanny agencies when I first got to the city. Now I'm not saying I'm the cat's meow or anything, but I can take care of some children. Although, I'm not fluent in Spanish. And to this day I have yet to receive a reply from any of the agencies I submitted to. Am I overqualified or do I lack the right qualifications? I guess it depends on where you live.

Not Your Average Dog-Walking Day

I have found that since moving to the big city, even the most dull days seem exciting to people, like walking the dog: "You're walking the dog--in New York! AWESOME!" And I suppose, in a way, they're right. Walking the dog through the streets of New York does offer one different sights and sounds than letting a dog out in your backyard. But, it's still walking the dog. There are some days though, every now and then, that feel like honest-to-goodness "New York Days", filled with real adventure. Yesterday was the first, full "New York Day" I have had since arriving a month ago.

I started the morning out trying to get to a train I had never been to before and treking through a Puerto Rican neighborhood where I was on the receiving end of several men shouting "Have a nice day at the beach!" (I was wearing a bathing suit top under my shirt, I will explain later) or "Gorgeous!" or "Hi there!" or the like. I haven't found the appropriate response to these men. I've heard stories of local women responding with angry gestures or exclamations, and really what are these men trying to accomplish? Have they ever had a women start talking with them as a result of one of their cat calls? I usually just smile and start walking faster. It's really awkward when they're standing there and you don't respond and then they keep eyeing you all the way down the block. The really persistent ones will plead with you to stop, "let me take your picture" etc. Anyway I digress. I was late getting to the train and so late meeting Jessamine for brunch in the East Village.

I arrived at the Flea Market Cafe and dined on Caramelized Apple Pancake while wondering what Jessamine had up her sleeve. We have been friends since high school and she moved up here right after college so she knows about all the cool New York secret stuff. All she had told me was to meet her at this cafe and bring my bathing suit. I imagined her taking me to a rarely-visited gem of a public pool in the basement of a museum, or whisking me to a labyrinthine system of sprinklers in the corner of a forgotten park. I had seen a family who had gotten off the train at the same time as me wearing bathing suits, and I thought, could there be some sort of indoor water park I didn't know about? I was intrigued.

After brunch we walked around, and did some casual brousing in an antique store, and then, out of nowhere, Jessamine stops on the sidewalk and says, "Do you know where we're going?" "I have no idea!" I said. I love surprises but am rarely surprised in my normal dog-walking life so this guessing and maybe not even getting close was fantastic. She points up to reveal a sign that reads: "Turkish and Russian Baths". Jess explains, "I've been wanting to go here forever, and now I've tricked you to come with me! There might be naked men inside!" I was simultaneously mortified at the thought of large sweaty naked men and further intrigued by this mysterious locale. "Great!" I said. We ran inside.

The place, was, in fact, authentically Russian. Think the sauna in Eastern Promises without the knife fights. We put our "valuables" in a safe deposit box and then were given another set of keys for our "locker" from a man who spoke with a Russian accent and seemed to be a fan of gold jewelry. In the locker room we put on our suits and shorts and flip flops and I noticed a sign that read, "On co-ed days you must wear shorts, if you don't you must leave." We went downstairs to the "baths". There were six different rooms to try, each one was hot and offered a different experience. The redwood room smelled of pine and offered a crisp, dry heat, while the aromatherapy room spat out hot smelly steam which stung your nostrils when you breathed. After sitting in one for a few minutes (there were also signs outside each room that said "Sitting in this room for more than 30 minutes can be seriously harmful to your health") you walk out to a small pool and plunge yourself for as long as you can stand it--the water is absolutely freezing. The effect is supposedly cleansing, relieving your body of toxins, and after getting out of the freezing pool you do feel quite refreshed, though wading through it is so cold it's mildly torturous.

The strangest room was called the Russian room. Here the look was reminiscent of a prison from medieval times. There were stone walls and wooden benches to sit on. In the middle of the room there was a well-looking structure with buckets. People would go over, dip the buckets in the well, and pour cold water over their heads when the heat became too oppressive. (And indeed this one was the hardest to sit in, it took labored effort to even move over to the buckets). Another funny thing, the place offered "spa treatments," and the five or so people trying to hock the treatments would come in and ask you every few minutes if you wanted a mud bath or an oak leaf massage, more in the style of street vendors trying to sell you a rolex than spa employees, and each time more earnest than the next. In the corner of the Russian room one of the street vendor guys was giving a man the oak leaf massage, which consists of him thrashing your back with a large clump of oak leaves. It looked terrible. After it was over street vendor guy literally had to drag the red-faced man out of the Russian room. Then he gave him some sort of pep talk and patted his cheeks and left the man sitting there, looking half-dead. If anyone ever offers you an oak leaf massage, I would think twice about it if I were you. I'm just saying.

The clientelle was actually a lot of young people, and a lot of women. They were also shooting some sort of "independent movie" while we were there and there were these "actresses" running around with scripts while a cameraman and a light man followed them, dragging cords through the standing water all over the floor. Fearing electrocution, we retreated to the sundeck to dry out, and left feeling 10 pounds lighter, like we'd just done three hours of hot yoga. And I was very happy not to have seen any large naked men.

Jessamine and I parted ways on the subway and I headed to a babysitting job near the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Their apartment literally overlooks a field of trees and in the spring, Cherry Blossoms. The mom was a really cool single mom who gave me guest passes to venture over to the Botanical Gardens with her son, Quill (Quill? I don't know, either) while I was gone. She warned me he had barely slept the night before and didn't know what was keeping him up. After she left, the little guy (he's 2) pleaded with me, "Outside, outside!" so we schlepped his stroller downstairs and across the street. Literally two seconds after I put him in the stroller he fell fast asleep. It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon and not the best time for a nap, but we were already inside the Botanical Gardens and I didn't want to turn around. The place was fantastic. For Nashvillians or those who went to my wedding it is a lot like Cheekwood, but maybe a tad bigger. There was a wedding going on though I have to say, Cheekwood has them beat in the event space department. It was super peaceful and beautiful there and you might forget you're in the city while sitting by the fountains and listening to the jazz music that was coming from the Brooklyn Museum, next door. The kid slept the whole time and I felt transported to another place in time.

After babysitting I met up with Sam, Tony, and Teri for a concert in Brooklyn. The concert didn't start 'til midnight so we hung out for a while, then found a good spot for the show. The band is called Apes and Androids and they have a Killers meets Journey meets Queen kind of sound. The show was a lot of confetti being dropped from the ceiling, and lights shining so bright in your face that you have to close your eyes and move your head back and forth--a kind of forced dancing. Other highlights included a glow-in-the-dark segment where they threw glowsticks and inflatable balls with glowsticks into the crowd and everyone was spinning and throwing these glowing things. It was what I pictured a rave to be like, if I had ever been to one.
They also had this tribe of glowing people come out in masks and island wear and spears and carrying a woman attached to a stick up on stage. Then they all did a funky dance in their glowy masks. It was pretty funky.

We ate a late night snack at Anytime Cafe down the street, and a lot of people from the Apes and Androids show were there too, still wearing their glowsticks. They played Queen (an odd coincidence) and everyone sang along loudly to the lyrics while munching on their cheesesticks and tater tots.

My feet are sore and swolen today from all of yesterdays travels, but my mind is racing with thoughts of cherry blossoms, glowing dancers, and new possibilities.

Subway Magic

It's official: I am totally in love with the New York Subway System. Firstly, I am beside myself to get a break from driving, paying for gas and car expenses, etc. etc. $80 a month for unlimited rides all the time sounds like the deal of the century from where I'm sitting. While other locals pass the time on the train listening to their favorite new tunes on their ipods (in fact I have been shocked with the diverse population of avid ipod users, from blue collar workers to elementary schoolers) or immersing themselves in a book or magazine, I pass the time by watching them. Not in a scary stalker way (I hope) I just see stories all around and I don't want to miss any of them (plus I have found on the occasion or two that I have started some reading I have ended up missing my stop).

When my mom was in town a couple of men trudged onto the subway, one fairly well dressed sort of dragging the other pretty bedraggled looking one along. The bedraggled one, we'll call him Paulo, was just barely hanging on, and he seemed to have a really sad look on his face. The spiffier one, we'll call Jefe, kept trying to reassure him and looked up a couple of times and just kind of smiled and shrugged over the state of his friend. I became dismayed because Paulo was sort of swaying right over my mom's infamous curly hair and I was convinced for several minutes that he was going to wretch all over her. He eventually grabbed on to another handle on the other side of the car, his friend (or lover?) all the while trying to console him. Mom and I both studied him the better part of the ride and neither one of us could figure out if something utterly horrible had just happened to him or if he had had one (or seven) too many. I invented the story that they had been at a dinner party, and while they were there he had gotten a call that his favorite grandmother was deathly ill in the hospital and probably wouldn't recover. Mom thought maybe Jefe had just broken up with Paulo, or at least someone had just broken his heart mightily. Sigh. I guess we will never know the truth.

Another thing worth mentioning (I'm just getting warmed up) are the wonderful art installations. I had no idea how many glorious creations they had been putting up in stations around the city for the past 23 years (the city started a program in 1985 to help fund these artists endeavors and have been slowly adding more every year)! I have literally stopped in my tracks upon rounding the corner and "discovering" (at least it feels as if you are) some of them. One of the first ones I saw is two stops up from us in Williamburg. The title of the series is "Signs of Life" by Jackie Chang.



Another one that I see a lot is the "Life Underground" series by Tom O'Herness. These are scattered all throughout the Union Square/14th St. stop on the L line, which is the train that takes us from Williamsburg to Manhattan. I can't say that these are my favorite, there's something about them that are a bit perverse. Some of the women creatures look topless to me and others look like they're up to no good. Sort of like lemmings. But metal.



Am I wrong? Do they not seem a bit nefarious?
One of the ones that impressed me most is at the Bryant Park stop, literally right beneath Bryant Park (for those of you who are familiar with Project Runway, I was amused to walk through one day, and the park was bursting with people, and also a huge group of business people, still in the work clothes, doing yoga together on the lawn)...Anyway this installation is so expansive, you have to take several long hallways to get to your train and the mosaic just keeps going and going, these pictures really do not do it justice.


Artist Sam Kunce aptly titled it "Under Bryant Park."
The most surprising one I've seen so far is at the Penn Station stop, only because it is so not what you would expect to find around the subway (if one were to have an expectation about subway art in the first place). It's called "Garden of Circus Delights" by Eric Fishl. Again the pictures do not really do justice to the detail and color that hits you in several different spots.


You really just need to come up and visit and see for yourself.