It did not bode well that all three of us came down with a sore throat a week before our trip to New York for the holidays. We had made the daring decision to take a red-eye for Westley’s first flight, so we were ready for the worst. Annoyingly, the flight kept getting delayed and ultimately got canceled. So we were forced to bring the baby back home after getting him all prepared in his sleep sack and car seat at the airport terminal. After regrouping for the daytime flight, Westley did surprisingly well on the plane, and we landed at JFK just in time for dinner and bedtime. On Sunday, we met up with my college friends and their kids for brunch at their upper-east-side apartment, then returned for a family reunion with my cousins over a Chinese banquet-style seafood dinner. The next morning, we awoke to dim sum and a visit to my parents’ senior center, before taking Westley on his first subway ride into the city. We walked along the High Line through SoHo, met my friend John for lunch with matzo ball soup, then stopped by Murray’s for a grilled cheese for the subway ride home. In the evening, we left Westley with my parents to enjoy a movie and dinner date. After watching The Last Jedi from our reserved recliner seats, we went to Le Bernardin for Eric Ripert’s tasting menu, which featured fluke, langoustine, monkfish, snapper, and meluza – all cooked to utter perfection in classic French-style, drenched in their respective sauces, and served in a newly-renovated dining room that evoked fish scales and ocean waves. After dinner, we walked past bustling Time Square to the iconic Rockefeller Center, where the Christmas tree was unfortunately unlit. We spent our last morning checking out the popular Holiday Train Show at the NYBG with Westley, then headed to Flushing’s New World Mall for lunch, where the Siblings potato noodles outshone the beef noodles from Lan Zhou Noodles, the duck noodles from Yoz Shanghai, or the cold noodles from Old Luoyang. We also got some dumplings from Golden Shopping Mall for the return flight, but Westley had a rough time on the flight back, even though we tried to keep him on West coast time throughout. Luckily, we have a week to recover from our action-packed trip!