Museum of Natural History

On Monday we ventured into the city with our friends Katie and Allison. We got an early start with all of our car seats fitting into Miss Katie's car. This was fun for all the kids and nice to not bring both cars into the city. Luckily Mr. Brent, Miss Katie's husband, works right in McPherson Square so we were able to park at his building and take and abbreviated metro trip to the museum. The train ride was lots of fun for the girls, Fiona and Allison's first experience with the Metro, and Luli's first that she could remember. Walking to the museum we held hands in one long line, Luli, Katie, Allison, Me, Fiona...very cute! however difficult to maneuver at points.

We found the museum and locked up our coats. We both decided to make the trip strollerless and that was definitely the right decision, logistically this would have been a nightmare. We found the dinosaurs immediately and looked them all over. Allison was a wee bit scared, and Luli tried to reassure her by explaining they were just bones and they couldn't hurt her, and they were nice dinosaurs. I was really fascinated by the size of a wing for one of the dinosaurs (that was crazy long!) And I know the T-Rex has small arms, but seriously that was just ridiculous how small they were. After exploring the dinosaurs we went to the fossil cafe and had lunch. I packed the girls lunch and enjoyed a highly overpriced cobb salad.

After lunch we headed upstairs to check out the Hope Diamond. The little gals were not nearly as impressed as the big girls! They were much more interested in this sand/quartz formation that looked like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow man.

Then we were onto the butterfly exhibit, we've been wanting to go there since last year and I thought the exhibit had closed already. The tickets were a bit much but I'm really glad we went in. My girlfriend Dana is really afraid of butterflies and she would have totally freaked out in there. They are flying all over the place and land on you and it's pretty cool (if you're not afraid of them). The kids really enjoyed it, but needed to take off some layers because it's a humid 84 degrees in the exhibit.

After the butterflies we thought it best to end our museum trip, the girls had behaved so great that we didn't want to push it. We headed back to Mr. Brent's office to say hi and do some drawing there, then home. I really thought Fiona would conk out because she was basically just walking sleep at Mr. Brent's office, but she rallied and stayed up the whole time. Needless to say it was an early/easy bedtime for my girls and Allison!