Here’s the link to his store, chocolatearth. http://chocolate-earth.com/CE/chocolatearth.html

He’s also hosting a pre-valentines beer and chocolate tasting event – that sounds deliciously fun too.

Just wanted to let you know!  Spread the word.

“All of that,” these days, means considering how we are going to support this nasty habit we have of having children and desiring to raise them with easy access to outdoors, and other children, and the great world out there.  New York is an awesome place to raise children if you have the funding to do so properly, live close to a park, have a good school nearby, and hopefully friends that are an easy commute.  But we still only have one income and no other funding prospects (they don’t have Fulbrights for parenting do they?) and so the question is starting to become a pressing one – How are we going to make this thing work?

Is it possible we will have to leave New York?

It’s a difficult question.  Everyone knows I, and we, love this city.  I’ve oft described it as a lover, a friend, the center of the universe etc. It’s really everything that a possibility-lover like me could imagine in an environment.  I love having one-minute friendships with strangers on the subway, the elevator – sharing real bits of life in real ways in effervescent moments that dissolve as quickly as they began.  I love that there are a million different city parks, zoos, beaches, toy stores, etc. to take the kids. I love that I have an eclectic and diverse network of friends here of all ages that I really respect and admire and find interesting.  I love that everything is always possible.

Except that, everything is not always possible.  First and foremost, you can’t have campfires here. Unrelated to that fact, and probably more of a factor in this discussion, is that if you don’t have enough money or time, you can’t get yourself out to enjoy all the possibilities.  You know they are there, but you are in your living room chasing after a two-year old and making sure the little one gets all of his naps in.  After that, even while you meet some nice friendly people you also run into a lot of gruff people who are just trying to take care of their own shit, which makes you feel like shit too when you are struggling.  And if you aren’t close to the park, or your friends, or the store, then it’s really all just an idea and not easily possible to take advantage of the awesomeness that is “The City.”

Entonces, while we love NYC, we don’t love it more than each other or our children, and we need things to be real, not just possible, right now.  And that, my friends, is why we are now thinking we might have to be saying goodbye.  It’s kind of huge, and pretty sad, but then it’s kind of grand, and really exciting. We’d be trading possible for actual and be able to relax into real life instead of what we were dreaming/hoping life might have been here.  So that’s the big intimate conversation we’ve been having with ourselves.

The hardest part would be leaving my mother. When you’re a mother there’s nothing like having your mother around. But I’ve already got a huge compelling argument in the works about why she would and should want to follow us too, who knows if it will be successful.  She’ll be able to retire soon so I think I can convince her, that is, unless my brothers give her some anchor-grandbabies to keep her here. Say no to anchor-grandbabies!

But at least we made it here!