Having kids in New York City is a unique American experience.  Not just because your children are exposed to exotic cultures (bacterial I mean) from around the world and there aren’t any shopping malls.  New York also has an amazing variety of obnoxious street sounds unlike other American communities such as drunken weeping, skull-crushing woofers, people yelling “forget about it” but with accents, and homelessness.

My kids have never slept a night without white noise playing loud enough to scramble a dog’s brain.

Their bedroom is an okay size for one adult person.  Two half-size people?  Manageable as long as all their belongings are also half-size.  So far so good.

The baby (9 months) has been teething miserably for roughly 9 months.  We recently discovered that she seems way more likely to sleep all night in the crib that’s been unoccupied since Ida (2 years old) started bunking above the trundle drawer that Mae (4 years old) sleeps in.   A couple nights ago, I was looking around their little room while rocking the baby back to sleep – through my sleepless haze, I began to imagine where MY stuff will go when my full-size self plus wife cram a king-size bed in there and give our three growing kids our much bigger, much nicer room.

New York City means paying half your monthly income for a two bedroom in Brooklyn.

But it doesn’t keep me up at night.
The children do.

Ida & Mae frolicking in the filth.