Survived my day at Philcon. Everywhere I went, people peered into the stroller and cooed, "Baby's first con!" Conrad did really well, for a three-month-old. I had to whisk him out of panel discussions and keynote speeches to de-fuss him once or twice for every hour of the programming I attempted to attend, and conversations were only sustainable for a maximum of ten minutes. Mostly, though, I was pleasantly surprised to have made it there at all.
Tonight we're recovering from our first attempt at wrangling two kids in Manhattan. Thanksgiving belonged to the Brooklyn in-laws this year. (That sounds like a baseball team, doesn't it? As in, "He pitched for the Brooklyn In-Laws back in 1936.") If you ever go to, say, the American Museum of Natural History in the company of six preschool-age children, here's the trick: Don't think of it as a museum visit at all. Think of it as a lunch outing with kids, on which you might get to see one or two bonus dinosaurs. Managing adult expectations is almost as hard as managing toddlers.