A Visit WIth the Ellies

Lyla has recently become infatuated with elephants (we call them "ellies" in our house). It started innocently enough with an elephant flash card, but snowballed quickly after she found a picture of elephant under the letter "E" in her favorite alphabet book AND watched a Backyardigans episode where Tyrone and Pablo have to deliver an elephant to a wildlife preserve. After that, I started to hear "ellie, peeese" pretty often and she started to dump four boxes of flash cards on the floor just to find the elephant card. Being the supportive mom that I am :), I bought her a little stuffed elephant, which she loved. I then repurchased said elephant when she dropped it somewhere in Whole Foods the very next day and proceeded to have a total meltdown. You get the point I'm trying to make -- Lyla is into elephants right now.

So last Sunday we took Lyla to visit the elephants at the Museum of Natural History. It really is an amazing museum. One of the many things that is so great about having Lyla around is that I see things in a totally new way. I try to keep her perspective in mind when planning our outings and from Lyla's perspective, boy is that museum awesome. I also know that I am working with a limited attention span and energy level, so we just hit the highlights and didn't try to cover every square inch of that place. With that philosophy in mind, where to start? With the dinosaurs, of course!

I don't think Lyla had ever seen a dinosaur in her books or cards, but she was pretty excited to see the huge dinosaurs at the museum. Don't get me wrong, she kept a white knuckle grip on Mark the whole time.




She called them 'saurs.

Mom, I'm not sure about this.


After the dinosaurs, we moved on to African Mammals... elephants.


She was thrilled. She may have even loosened up the death grip to get a closer look.




Next up: the giant whale.


While the elephants were exciting because she just loves ellies, the marine life exhibit was even more fun because we just let her run free through the entire room -- back and forth and up and down.






Reading up on Cities in the Sea :)


Finally, one of our favorites -- the squid and the whale.


Lyla promptly passed out when we left the museum. Mark and I treated ourselves to burgers and shakes from the new Shake Shack on the UWS. Not a bad day to spend a Sunday.