American Museum of Natural History

Our first day in New York (Sunday) we spent recovering from the drive of the day and night (and a bit of the next morning) before, and then having dinner with Steph's sister Kim. On Monday Steph and I left Evan with my mom and went to the MoMA for the afternoon. That meant that after two days in New York, Evan had not seen much more of the city than the front of my parent's co-op.

That obviously had to change, and on Tuesday it did. Part of the reason we wanted to come to New York when we did was that the American Museum of Natural History was featuring an exhibit called Mythic Creatures that Steph read about in the New Yorker several months ago. The exhibition focuses on how the stories behind creatures of legend (dragons and mermaids, for example) arise in various cultures, often encouraged by misinterpretation of evidence from the natural world. This is a topic Steph has been very interested in for a long time, and it dovetails rather nicely with some of her work, so this exhibit was one of our "must sees" on this trip.

So late Tuesday morning (we didn't get much done before lunch this entire trip, primarily due to sleep deprivation) we bundled the boy up and headed out for his first day on the town in New York. Here we are during Evan's first ever subway ride:

This wasn't really his first subway ride, seeing as how he's been on BART back home a couple of times, but BART is not the New York MTA! The hard plastic seats, utterly unintelligible station announcements, and perpetually dirty track beds lend The Subway some type of gravitas that the BART system just can't muster. Unfortunately he didn't get to see his first subway rat on this trip (the final score of our traditional "Find the Rat" game this year was 0-0, in fact), but there's always next year.

As it turns out, the Mythic Creatures exhibition was a little disappointing, although still interesting. What we all liked the most was the Butterfly Conservatory. Every year the museum cordons off one small wing and re-creates a tropical forest environment filled with butterflies that you can walk through. Check out the huge pink and black butterfly in the foreground of this picture:

That butterfly seemed to like to sit on his leaf and slowly flex his wings, but a lot of the other ones were more mobile, fluttering around the room and alighting wherever they chose. Steph, in fact, made a new friend while we were there:

After a few minutes we had to have one of the staff escort this butterfly to a more suitable perch (they prefer you not touch the butterflies yourself) so we could leave. We tried moving slowly towards the door, but some insects just can't take a hint.

It was hard to tell how much Evan was taking in, but at one point when a big blue butterfly took off from a leaf in front of us he really noticed it (his head whipped right around) and tracked it through its zigzags around the room. He followed it for maybe 10 seconds until it went over my head and disappeared in the foliage behind me (I was too busy watching him to track the butterfly as well). I don't know if he liked it quite as much as the adults, but I think he had a pretty good time.