The Kid Has Arrived

The best day of Milo’s life

In another instance of Matt hitting it out of the ballpark of awesomeness, he bought us tickets to the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show, with an extra ticket to go see the sing-a-long performance with Thomas the Tank Engine. He completely and thoroughly blew Milo’s mind with this day.

Milo’s fascination with and love for trains continues unabated. Rare is the hour of the day when there’s not at least one toy train in the child’s hand. “Dee deeeeee” is the constant refrain floating through our house. But we weren’t totally sure how the Holiday Train Show would go over with him. Would he be upset that he couldn’t get down and play with the trains? Would he be able to take it all in? Would it keep his interest long enough to make the travel time and the expense worth it?

The answer to this last question was a resounding holy-shit-are-you-guys-seeing-this YES. The boy was shocked into a rapt awe of silence and pure joy.

It’s a really lovely little exhibit featuring models of historic New York houses and landmarks, interspersed with model trains running on tracks around the houses and over models of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.

(Check it out, Ari, it’s Olana!)

We were a little concerned when we first got there because there was a long line to get into the exhibit. Milo started getting antsy while we were waiting, but luckily the line moved fairly quickly. Once we got into the room, Milo’s mouth fell open and his eyes got big, taking it all in. He’d whisper quietly “dee deee” every once in a while, but that was about it. At one point, the exhibit path goes out a door way and winds back around to create some space. Milo thought we were leaving and immediately started bawling his eyes out. The security guard took pity on us and let us skip back into the room without making the full detour.

One little track had a Thomas engine pulling the cars. Milo broke out into a big smile, and would wave “hiiii hiiii” each time Thomas made his way back around. 

After the train show, we walked over to the performance hall and did this:

Uh huh. You know those things that you find yourself doing once you have a kid, and it just kind of blows your mind that this is you and that you’re sitting in this room doing this seriously weird thing all because you love your kid so stinkin’ much? Yeah. We paid like 40 bucks to sit in an auditorium with an audience full of toddlers all grasping various Thomas trains to watch some poor Theatre major dude sing Thomas songs and watch a creepy animatronic Thomas car talk about Sir Topham Hatt.

Here’s Milo clapping wildly to the songs:

Stunned into silence:

Obligatory family photo (subtitled: Damn, girl, you need a haircut!)

For reals, the best day of Milo’s young life so far.