Littleboys & The City

When we first moved to New York, trips to Manhattan were anything but easy with the boys. On our first visit to Central Park, we managed to lose Littleboy 1 for a very frightening 10 minutes in one of its vast playgrounds; then there was that time, described here, where I was so distracted by the boys I thought mistakenly I'd left my purse in a taxi, causing The Doctor to make a mad dash down Fifth Avenue in 90 degree heat. Visits to museums were fraught; at four and two and half, the Littleboys tended to run around frantically touching things they weren't supposed to touch. (A visit to the Metropolitan with my Dad, I seem to recall, consisted mainly of chasing them.)

Although it's an easy train journey from here, by the time you factor in taking two tired boys there and back, 40 minutes each way, and with the two of them usually behaving appallingly on the train itself, the whole day becomes very stressful. On our first visits we were also encumbered by a pushchair, making the subway nightmarish; it was no better in taxis, where the boys tended to crawl around the back seat, delighted by the lack of carseats. Since then, although we've made the odd foray to places like the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, trips into central Manhattan with both Littleboys have been fairly few and far between.

So yesterday, I am happy to report, was a bit of a milestone. We got up early, got to the Museum of Natural History as it opened, and spent a (mostly) trouble-free couple of hours looking around. Now four and almost six, the boys are fascinated by dinosaurs, partly thanks to Dino Dan, a fab Canadian TV show that has really stoked their interest, and impressed me by identifying not just your basic dinos, such as T-Rex, but stuff like Euoplocephalus which certainly would have had me stumped. Littleboy 2, following his starring role as a walrus in a play about polar animals, was also very pleased with the Hall of Ocean Life, although he did complain that there were no Orca whales. Shocking.

We only had one strop (in the cafe, where a cup of water instead of a $4 apple juice caused a minor meltdown on Littleboy 2's behalf) and saw everything we wanted to see before going off for a slap-up brunch with a friend on the Upper West Side. Even here, the boys behaved well (thanks, partly, to us letting them play Angry Birds on the iPad) while we knocked back Mimosas and over-the-top egg dishes.

The afternoon turned, somewhat accidentally, into a long ramble through Central Park. We had thought we would go there briefly and find a playground; but the park is so much bigger than you expect, and we kept finding new little pockets, such as the Belvedere Castle (view from which is pictured above), which just had to be explored. We didn't find the big playground we remembered (the scene of Littleboy 1's disappearance) but we found a smaller one with a great curving slide built into the rock, down which small children were luge-ing on their coats.

It was almost 6.30pm when we walked back up to our front door. The boys were filthy; thanks to the muddy park and the grimy floor of Penn Station, where they had insisted on playing as we waited for the train. They were tired, of course - but they were still walking - in fact, no-one was carried the whole day - and any whining had been kept to a minimum during the return journey.

What's more, after a hot bath and hairwash, they appeared to be raring to go again - while we were ready to collapse, exhausted, into bed.

So; with just an extra 18 months on our side, the combination of Littleboys and the City turns out to be a successful one after all. And with (probably) half our time here already elapsed, I'm going to have to make sure we make the most of it.