Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)

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Published by
Sterling & Ross Publishers
New York, NY 10001
www.sterlingandross.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCord, Alex.
Little kids, big city : tales from a real house in New York City (with lessons
on life and love for your own concrete jungle) / by Alex McCord and Simon
van Kempen.
p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-9821392-2-6 (pbk.)

1. Parenthood--New York (State)--New York. 2. Child rearing--New York
(State)--New York. I. Van Kempen, Simon. II. Title.
HQ755.8M414 2010
306.874092--dc22
[B]

2010005899

Photo on page 208: Edward “Garou” Linders
Cover design: The Book Designers
Book design: Rachel Trusheim

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

To the Chums,
François & Johan,
without whom this book would not have been possible

To our Mothers,
Elaine van Kempen & Alexis Williams,
without whom this book would also not have been possible

and

To the Memory of
François Johan Walter “Frank” van Kempen &
David Robert “Bob” McCord,
because they had quite a bit to do with it, too…

Introduction

Alex

I moved to New York City in 1996 after having spent a couple of fashionably nomadic years running around Europe modeling, acting and drinking cappuccino in the morning and Champagne in the evening. I rode in yellow Porsches with cute boys whose mothers’ homes were photographed for magazines, read
The Economist
and
Mother Jones
for balance and all I wanted to do was act, make beautiful things and live large. Pursuing dual careers as an actress and graphic designer, I had no intention of even choosing a steady relationship, let alone getting married. I never wanted to settle down, because to me it meant succumbing to all the things I didn’t want in my life. I was afraid of waking up one day with a boring job, a marriage to someone I didn’t particularly like who was the best person available at the time, a minivan and a house that looked like everyone else’s. I did all those things our mothers warned us about and had fun doing them. Along the way I met a crazy Australian who was in town for three weeks on business, and at the time, an alliance with a “use-by date” was a good thing. Don’t things happen when you least expect them? A year later we were married.

One thing that’s completely consistent about my life is that I’ve always been quick to recognize something I want when I see it, and I wanted Simon. My family was a bit shell-shocked not only when I announced that I planned to get married, but also that I chose a man everyone agreed my father would have loved. We were wildly in love then and still are to this day.

Engaged!

Simon

In February 1999, I moved to Sydney after spending 13 years living in London, to act as a luxury hotel consultant and expand the company’s Asia-Pacific business. In May I was sent to see a potential client in New York, and very early one morning, severely jet-lagged, I logged on to a dating website that I’d joined in Australia. I temporarily changed my location to NYC, as I was only planning on being in town for three weeks and wasn’t seeking the woman of my dreams: merely a drink, a dinner and a local’s perspective on the Big Apple. I remember seeing that a new profile “Yetisrule” had just appeared and seemed to be in the process of joining the site. That early in the morning I really didn’t expect to find anyone else logged on, but then again I was in the city that never sleeps. Little did I know then that if I met this
Yeti Who Rules,
I would embark on a journey that 10 and a half years later has brought me to be sitting here writing on the Acela train as I dash between NYC and Washington, D.C. But what’s more surprising is that that early Sunday morning jet lag set off a chain of events that had me moving back to the northern hemisphere, disappointing my mum in the process and marrying a woman who I never really believed existed for me.

For the next nine months I lived out of a suitcase, as every month I would visit my four main clients, each on a different continent. Given my itinerant lifestyle—and I was now madly in love with Alex—I decided to move base camp from Sydney to New York, which basically involved putting everything back in a shipping container that the year prior had been shipped from London to Australia. Alex and I put down digs in a duplex apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, after she happily scrambled out of her rent-stabilized but dreary one bedroom on the Upper East Side. We were married at Maxim’s, the Madison and 61st Street sister of the iconic Parisian restaurant.

Alex & Simon Get Married!

Alex

We continued as newlyweds in our two-bedroom apartment on the UWS, and took on the world as a team. Simon flew around the world consulting (occasionally I joined him if his hotel clients needed a graphic designer), while I happily acted, designed, noodled around with the stock market and threw parties for our friends. We traveled to China, Europe, Australia and wherever work or whimsy took us. After 18 months in our rental apartment we decided that the time was right to buy a place.

When two people get together to buy a home, it’s a big deal for both. We each had our own ideas of what the perfect apartment looked like, but soon realized our deal breakers were pretty similar. We both wanted outdoor space—just living near a park wasn’t going to cut it. We nearly made an offer on a quirky little pre-war one bedroom on Jane Street in Greenwich Village, but the triangular terrace only got direct sunlight for one hour a day. Not good enough. After a month or so of looking, we found a co-op triplex in Park Slope, a lovely area in Brooklyn, with a sixth floor terrace from which we could see a spectacular view of Manhattan, New Jersey and even Staten Island if you looked around the corner.

We settled in and began making the apartment our own, including a gut renovation, though we still hadn’t changed our minds about children—we didn’t want any and were sticking to it. So we said. As the next two and a half years went by and our relationship got stronger we did gradually change our minds. Maybe there was a reason we’d bought a three-bedroom apartment after all. The best way I can describe it is that we wanted to share our love or perhaps our love had grown so much that there was now more to share. I remember at one point, the cat Simon owned with his first wife was run over by a car in London and we both got really emotional. Sometime after that we noticed for the first time we were both having clucky feelings. I looked at babies on the streets of New York and for the first time, I could imagine myself having one. Somewhere around Halloween we agreed that I’d toss the pills, and by February I’d almost forgotten we’d done that when I threw up in Times Square. At 8:30 in the morning. Not hungover.

With me pregnant, we threw ourselves full tilt into preparation for our life change. I didn’t know what parenthood was going to look like, but had no intention of leaving the city or even changing our lifestyle much beyond welcoming the new member of the family. I had no idea of the changes in store, and (let’s not kid ourselves) there have been quite a few. I’m happy, however, to report that it’s possible to be a parent and
not
get stuck in a boring job and relationship, with a boring car and house. It
is
possible to have children and not feel as though you’ve “settled.” You
can
be eight months pregnant and wear a leather miniskirt. You
can
take a baby on the subway, to a museum or to Africa. Call me naïve, but I didn’t expect that. I’m still me, and I still love the city. Now I get to share that experience with my two adorable, sassy, frustrating but mind-blowingly loved boys.

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