The kids have discovered Mary Poppins. They are mesmerized by it, the songs, the dancing, and the accents have them completely star struck. Luke copies the way Bert dances and I have to say he is pretty spot on with the moves. When it's time to go one of them will say "spit spot" well, actually Ellie says it more like "split splot". The scene where they ride the carousel horses is one of their favorites so when John told them about the carousel at the New York State Museum Ellie was all in and wanted to go straight away.
Today we happened to both have the day off so we whisked them away for a carousel ride and took a trip back in time for ourselves. The State Museum looks the same as it did when we were kids. The statues of loggers, the stuffed giant wholly mammoth, the vintage displays of Adirondack campers and the Native American Longhouse are all exactly as I remembered them. There is now an entire wing devoted to 9/11 which is of course solemn and breath-taking. I peered into a trailer of all of the "trash" that was saved of make-shift memorials from families of the missing. It was eerie, it reminded me of this and as I walked away I made the sign of the cross because I just didn't know what else to do.
We meandered through the diverse neighborhoods of Manhattan, saw lots of bird species and bones of fish, the skeleton of a mastadon, and made wishes in a fountain. It all felt like we were living in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Every so often John would grab my hand as we watched the kids take in the magic of what they saw. It was just the right kind of magic to distract me from what happened on this day 9 years ago.
She named her horse "boy" and was saying, "bye bye boy!"
Seriously looks like a scene from Ferris Bueller right? I mean, if he had kids and was 36, not 17.
Saying good-bye to the train conductor.
Too young to understand what this means.
