In order to take the girls out of school for three months, Barbara had to write a “lesson plan” and submit it to the school principal. We had to explain how we were going to make up for all the precious hours of recess and spelling tests that the girls were going to miss.

I thought we should just write “We’re going to take them around the world.” But Barbara wisely vetoed that. She wrote up a list of activities, that included several museum visits.

The first museum visit set a high bar: The Americian Museum of Natural History (home of the Hayden Planetarium, where rock star astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director).

There are a few things that make this museum special. One is the truly world class dinosaur exhibit, brilliantly laid out according to the evolutionary traits the fossils have in common.

Another is the The Scales of the Universe exhibit at the planetarium, which uses the building itself as a measuring stick to explain how big and small everything in the universe is.

The museum is also across the street from Central Park. Location, location, location.

We started in the morning with a butterfly exhibit…and learned that the girls really do not like butterflies anymore.

Several of the older exhibits at the museum are done as large scale dioramas with models, paintings and taxidermied animals. In one, Jill found a model of a Moa, the extinct giant bird of New Zealand. This made our New Zealand obsessed Lord of the Rings fan very happy, and partially made up for the trauma of butterflies possibly landing on her head.

The small-scale IMAX theatre was showing a fantastic Canadian film called Flight of the Butterflies, starring Gordon Pinsent (that’s how you know it’s off the charts in terms of Can-con). Pinsent portrayed a University of Toronto professor, who led a decades-long project, involving hundreds of volunteers from across North America, as they tracked the migration patterns of Monarch butterflies, and eventually discovered their secret winter hideaways. I’m not going to tell you where. It’s a great movie, you should go see it if you can.

There was an excellent exhibit all about whales. There was one all about food production and shipping (foreshadowing some of the far away crops we would see up close, like bananas in South Africa and sugar cane in Australia).

The girls easily found their way around the abundant touchscreens, which provided all kinds of information, one bit sized piece at a time. They really were much more accessible than paragraph after paragraph printed on a plaque.

The planetarium show was fun as always, and did a great job explaining the life cycle of the sun, including the unfortunate demise of the Earth in about 5 billion years time.

Eventually, we were out of time ourselves. We returned to the apartment and enjoyed some leftover pizza, and some quality time with Henry.

But New York is the city that never sleeps! So later we headed out to another favourite spot, Times Square. If you’ve never been, the easiest way to describe it is that there’s so much light from the signs all over the place, that midnight can feel like 6pm.