17 More Things We've Learned Since Moving to New York City

1. We’ll have to get used to going food shopping once a week or more. Our fridge/freezer and pantry are simply not big enough to hold much more than that.
2. If you do have to go to the store (an Aldi just opened ten minutes away!), go when you have to move your car anyway for the street sweeper.
3. Make sure you carefully read posted parking signs. Pay particular attention to start and end times, if there are any. Failing to do this may cost you sixty bucks.
4. Public schools (and street sweepers) in New York City observe all kinds of holidays. Students had two days off for Rosh Hashanah a couple of weeks ago. (Ginny’s Christian school was, however, still in session.)
5. Just because you live within yards of dozens of people doesn’t mean that you’ll see them very much, if at all. Walking back from the bus stop last week Ginny and I met a woman and her two kids who live on the 5^th floor. In two months I’d seen the son once or twice, but never the mom.
6. Be prepared for the cost of your car insurance to triple. Yes, TRIPLE.

   

   Friends from PA--a family of 

   6--visited one weekend

7. Finding a church that preaches the Bible is non-negotiable. The weekly smacks in the face are necessary.
8. If you choose not to put your 4 year-old in Pre-K, be prepared that there will be NO other kids her age at story time in the library, because pretty much all the 4 year-olds in the City are in Pre-K.
9. It is indeed possible to fit an additional family of 6 into your already tight 3-bedroom apartment. For one night, at least.
10. Doing laundry at the laundromat will get easier each time.
11. Setting up life in a new place takes time. More than two months here, and we’re still working on car insurance, setting up doctors, registering our van, getting new driver’s licenses, and figuring out where to put stuff in our apartment.
12. Having so much in walking distance from your house is awesome. Here’s a partial list of what we can walk to: bank, pharmacy, doctors for all five of us, post office, parks and playgrounds, coffee shops, Chinese restaurant, pizza places, numerous restaurants, several big stores, and probably hundreds of smaller shops.
13. We discovered, quite accidentally, that we can go out onto the roof of our building. There’s not much up there but satellite dishes and exhaust pipes, and the view isn’t as spectacular as I had hoped – I was holding out hope that we could at least see the Manhattan skyline, but alas – but it was still pretty neat to be up there.
14. Phone calls, texts, emails, Skype and Facetime sessions, and visits from friends and family are wonderful encouragements. (To be fair, we already knew this, but it bears repeating.) 
15. October is a wonderful month for parking. They suspend the street sweeping on 8 days this month, and if you play it right, you can leave your car in the same place for almost three weeks!
16. Prayer is vital to, well, everything. Big and small, “spiritual” and “ordinary.” We knew this as well, of course, but we are repeatedly reminded of it.
17. Even though our home is significantly smaller than our previous one, we still manage to lose things. Currently, we have misplaced one of our cell phone chargers.

    

    Sunset view from the rooftop of our building