NYC Day 2 - Sony, Central Park, and Matilda

My phone chimed when someone tagged me in a Facebook post around 8 am on Friday morning.  It's a good thing; otherwise we might have slept away our vacation!  We are not a late night family during the school year, so the nearly-midnight bedtime the previous evening meant we were slow to get moving this morning!

James had a 9:00 phone call for work, and he wasn't sure whether it would be of the 5-minute or 45-minute variety.  After a few minutes, the kids and I got the signal to head on out without him.  We were headed to the Sony WonderLab to get tickets, which meant a stroll uptown.  We passed Rockefeller Center again and the Atlas statue.  Rudy is reading Percy Jackson and studying ancient Greece and Rome, so all of the mythology in the city art was particularly timely. 

The timing actually worked out pretty well.  The lab was quiet this early in the morning, so we requested 10:15 tickets and spent the next half hour playing with the cool Sony gadgets in the adjoining store.  (I even got to lay my hands on the new phone that Santa might bring in my stocking...)  James met us just before our entry time.  Inside, we created our avatars, performed "heart surgery," programmed robots, danced, and mixed music (our rendition was pretty terrible!).

 I'm not even sure what to call this, but it was a hit...you could "catch" the jewels.  The kids loved it!

We met up with John for lunch and a personal tour next.  FAO Schwarz was a must see for the kids, especially after watching Big.  Of course, we had to visit the piano.  And the Lego section.  and Playmobil.  and hug all of the stuffed animals.  and watch all of the demonstrations...

Finally, it was on to Central Park.  Between Elf (where Santa's sleigh crashes in the park) and Madagascar (set in the Central Park Zoo), the kids were somewhat familiar with the idea of the park, but had no idea of the actual scale until we got there.  

We happened to time the walk through the zoo with the seal feeding.  

Rudy really wanted to climb rocks and trees.  Every corner you come around in Central Park has rocks and trees to climb, so we made pretty slow progress.  We'd let the kids play whenever the mood struck, but we'd eventually move them along because John had a pretty specific idea of where to go.  He kept promising Rudy that he had a perfect place to climb rocks, and Rudy kept giving him a look of complete exasperation.  

We still wanted to see Matilda, so James took off for the TKTS booth while the rest of us continued through the park.  Finally, John delivered big on his promises.  Big rocks with - bonus! - a stream running right through them!  The kids spent a blissful 45 minutes building a dam and playing here.

The last stop on the tour was the castle after which, the kids wanted a bathroom and a water fountain.  We were all duly impressed when John delivered on that request as well, walking us straight to both.  I thought it was particularly impressive for a single city guy with no kids to know the precise location of the bathrooms and water fountains!

The timing worked out perfectly, so that James met us (with Matilda tickets in hand) just as we were leaving the park.  Rudy had his eye on a stuffed animal souvenir (shocking, right?) from FAO Schwarz, so we headed back to the toy store before splitting up with John and finding dinner.  Dinner was a bit of a fail on my part; what I expected to be a reasonably priced Korean restaurant turned out to be a rather pricey Korean tapas restaurant.  It was ta$ty...

 Back to Broadway for Matilda.  It was good, but hard to compare to Aladdin the previous night!

Desserts to share at Guy Fiero's restaurant.  I don't watch cooking shows, so couldn't really tell you too much about Guy...but the desserts were perfectly sweet and gooey!  Rudy had taken a 5-minute snooze at dinner and caught another 10 minutes here.  Thankfully, we were less than a block to the hotel...where all heads hit pillows very soon after walking through the door!