One Last Field Trip

Since this was a holiday weekend PLUS Clio's birthday weekend and, quite likely, her last weekend as an only child, it seemed like a good idea to do as many special things as we possibly could. We've been thinking about going to the Children's Museum of Manhattan for ages, but it's way up on the Upper West Side, and between the anticipation of traffic nightmares and parking woes, we never quite got up the gumption. But a Sunday morning on a holiday weekend is the perfect time to breeze into the city, so off we went.

In a way, the Upper West Side is a whole other world, and I felt a little bit like an anthropologist exploring a foreign culture. First of all, the museum was PACKED. (This is one of the problems with New York City: there are 11 million people here, and whenever you have a really good idea for an activity, it seems like about 1 million of them have the very same good idea.) Interestingly, half the crowd didn't speak English. The other half spoke a LOT of English, shouting out their kids names over and over again. Dave and I made a pact to cross any name we heard in that place off our list. Luckily, Audrey and Chase were never on our list in the first place. Beyond the shouting, we were also surprised to find that the parents were in fact much more of a problem than the children: they blocked other kids from slides, bridges, and puzzles, having eyes only for their own precious little ones.

I've also noticed that people are much fancier uptown. (Okay, so this is nothing new: Billy Joel famously sang about it, etc. etc.) Today, I noticed it especially in the high volume of patent leather and metallic footwear: pink patent clogs on a new mom, black patent wedge heeled espadrilles on a grandma, and every shade of silver, gold, and bronze sandal you can imagine. Dave and I were not only decked out in Target and Old Navy, but we were both wearing Birkenstocks. How very outer borough.

Anyway, the museum itself is kind of a nice place, though we really only made it to one exhibit. Can you guess what it was? Why, yes, Dora the Explorer. Clio was beyond thrilled. Here's a sampling of photos that speak for themselves: