Saturday morning we had a plan! We headed to the American Museum of Natural History. After a long trip on the subway, in which one train didn’t run on the weekends (yet didn’t say that anywhere) and then the train that did run, ran express past our stop only, we did make it. After the trip, we stopped for a smoothie and falafel from the trucks that are ubiquitous everywhere. Good snack for us vegetarians. We got into the museum gratis courtesy of Jordi’s job, and headed right for the dinosaurs.

Ewan loved the exhibit, lots of room to run around and move and touch things. He’d had plenty of being trapped and strapped in places the previous day. The girls were fairly impressed, but mostly loved to play with any touch screen exhibit around the place. We spent time with the dinosaurs and then some other prehistoric animals, lunch and then some apes getting closer to humans and the planets. Celia very astutely noticed ‘they almost look like people!’ at the Neanderthals and other not quite homo-sapiens.

After the museum, we promised the girls a treat and found that one Magnolia bakery was not too far away. We headed down, Ewan asleep while carried, Celia passing out in the stroller on the way there. We picked up some cupcakes and cookies and went towards Central Park to nosh down on it all.

She was super tickled to get one with this little pink rose. They were delicious, light and fluffy, and sweet. It gave me a good idea of how I was supposed to make my cakes look and taste from their cookbook! While we were in central park we found a playground to let the kids work off some steam and relax away from cars and sidewalks. We went to the adventure playground.  Ewan’s favorite thing was to find every bit of trash and pick it up and play with it. In the museum too, he found every program and map.

While we were playing it rained on us a bit, but it passed pretty quickly. While we were sitting there our friend Larry got in touch and came to meet us there. He remembered playing at this same playground as a kid too! Electronic devices predicted that it would rain again, and soon, for a while so we decided to head across the park to the zoo where there would be a bit of coverage and protection from the rain. On our way it was raining. One stop we made per Josie’s request was at the statue of a dog named Balto. This dog delivered medicine to some very sick people in Alaska, and she had read a book about it just the previous week. So they were tickled to see the statue, even if we only hung out for a few seconds in the rain to take a picture. Oddly some other women were taking their picture with the dog too. I’m not sure I see the attraction, for the adults.

About the time we finally got across the park and to the zoo, it stopped raining. We watched the sea lions, the penguins, some ducks (and some pigeons pretending to be ducks as seen below). We hiked up to the Red panda and Josie regaled Larry with the entire story of Frozen, because he admitted he hadn’t seen the movie.

After the zoo, we headed back toward Koreatown with Uber to a restaurant literally a few businesses up from our place, that unfortunately had no high chair. We scrambled for someplace else and came up with yet another nearby restaurant that produced some yummy bi bim bop and tofu soup for us all before we went back to our hotel, let the kids get some nice sensory bath time and went to bed, late again for them, early for us. Oh and before dinner, while we waited for the table we went to the top of our hotel to stare up at the empire state building for a few moments. The top is a bar though, so the kids weren’t really supposed to be there.

Each of these days Celia kept saying ‘oh I see the statue of liberty!’ when she saw an advertisement or statue for a tourist shop. So we felt like maybe we should give her a clue of what it really was. We knew we weren’t going to really go take the ship and go see it while they’re so young. We’ll bring them back when they’re older and they’d actually understand it and learn something from it. In the morning though we had plans to meet up with my cousin Will who we haven’t seen in a while. We met with him and his wife Sarah for some brunch. After yet more issues with high chairs (here’s the one table that fits your big group, yes we have a high chair, but no that high chair doesn’t fit at that bar height table as we figured out at seating) we had a very yummy and fun brunch together.

After brunch we headed south to the very tip of Manhatten to get a glimpse of the statue of liberty. Again the kids loved the wide open space to run around in, the gorgeous sunshine and could sort of see the statue. Josie and Celia even unprompted came together for a hug.

After some good run around time, we headed back north to Chinatown on the subway for some treats. The girls had some super cute cakes and we tried a sponge cake too. We also looked around for some dumplings before heading further uptown to Penn station for our ride home. The train was delayed, but we picked up snacks, tooled around a little before catching our train back home. We got in late, but it worked out with more eating, a bit more sleeping, and lots of bathroom trips again.

What’s always fun is watching the girls play out what we did on our trip when we got home. The girls had fun playing train and lugging around bags pretending to travel in the city, complete with requiring lots of hand holding and stroller holding!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2014 at 10:39 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.