Jane and Malcolm: April 2015

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Salem

On Wednesday of vacation week we met Nana and Grammy in Salem. First we went to the Peabody Essex museum and there was a cool exhibit of wooden art.

The kids weren't very well behaved until I finally let them into the kids' room.

Two-headed witch!

Grammy bought them chocolate frogs at the Harry Potter store!

Monday morning was something! It was pouring, so we had to walk half a mile in the rain to get to the subway. I think in this case most people would get a cab, but what do you do about booster seats? Plus, cabs creep me out. We got soaked. My feet weren't dry that day until we got home at 7:30pm. Then the subway was delayed so we had to wait a long time.

Once we arrived at the Natural History Museum there was a huge line (or mob) waiting to get in. We waited outside in the rain for a while, then had to wait in line to get tickets to enter the museum. Our goal had been to get there right at 10 when they opened but it was 11. We had to quickly find the exhibits we wanted to see the most before we ran out of time. First was the Africa room.

This is in the Rose Center for Earth and Space. You can see how soaked Jane is!

Dinosaurs!

I was glad we saw the blue whale before we had to leave. Malcolm has been asking me for years how big they are!

Near the train station we went to a deli for lunch. They brought us a plate of delicious pickles!

Malcolm's chicken fingers. This was a huge portion but he actually ate most of it! (Not the vegetables, of course...)

I had cheese blintzes with blueberries.

Most of the train ride home was fine until the very end when Jane got fed up and started freaking out. I think we'll wait a few more years before we go back to New York. I'm glad we saw the sights and ate some great food but we're still recovering from the lack of sleep and mental exhaustion!

the view

Here's the view from our hotel room. Not super picturesque, but we could see trains and the Hudson river.

Central Park

One of the items on our itinerary was to visit the Intrepid aircraft carrier either Saturday or Sunday afternoon. It seemed like a good time to go, but the kids wanted nothing to do with it for some reason. I don't know what child wouldn't want to look at planes, tanks and a space shuttle, but we didn't want to push them!

We went to Central Park instead. Jane buried herself in sand.

Malcolm got sandy, too, and dumped it out of his shoes.

The kids like pigeons because we don't see them very often at home.

They watched this squirrel for a long time. I was becoming frustrated because we have lots of squirrels at home!

Finally we convinced them to go to the Central Park Zoo, even though it was a bit of a hike to get there and they were tired.

Penguins!

We didn't know that we'd see grizzly bears in New York City!

This one dug himself a nice spot to nap in.

I was very cold so I was happy to be in the warm rainforest room. Jane hated it and said it was too hot. I snapped as many photos as I could quickly since she wanted to leave.