Cancellation of Yellow Game, Graffiti, and Traffic

Until further notice the "yellow game", where you shout out the word "yellow" any time you see a yellow vehicle, has been cancelled. It only took about 2 minutes of being outside the LaGuardia airport and hearing Mollie shout "Yellow" about 100 times for all the taxies and buses in New York City for us to decide that the "Yellow Game" really is not that much fun in NY. We quickly replaced our trained eyes to look for graffiti instead. Annie asked Aunt Jen what all the paintings on the walls and buildings was for and Aunt Jen said she never realize just how much graffiti there really is in the city. It shows you how used you get to things you see all the time and how a different perspective every once in awhile is good for us all. The girls also learned about traffic! When we first programmed Aunt Jen's address into the GPS it said it would take us two hours and nine minutes to get home. After two hours in the car it said it would be another hour and fifty minutes. Yikes! That was the longest nineteen minutes of the girls' lives. If you quiz them on what the red dots, yellow dots, and blue lines mean on the traffic map on the phone they know them quite well. The worst part about it was that the girls wanted to see their cousins so bad and it took so long to get home, but we did have time to discuss what we had learned and thought about our day of travel. We will share what we have discovered so far: Airplanes are not ugly but they aren't real stylish either. They don't really smell like anything - just airplanes. The Big Apple got its name from either the horse races around NYC being referred to as the big apples because they had such big prizes, or from the jazz musicians making reference to the fact there are a lot of "apples" in the world but only one "big apple", or the fact that a "big apple" was used in a tourism campaign as a bright cheery representation of the city because so many thought of it as a dark, dangerous place. Overall our first day was long but had a lot of adventures and a lot of new experiences.