Toronto Trip

So I took the kids out of the country by myself last week, because J was gone on vacation and if you’re going to do something interesting with your boys why not do something REALLY interesting?

And it went fine. They are good kids, and Canada is a relentlessly polite and welcoming place. Also, people go out of their way to help a Dad who’s alone with his little ones. I don’t think I had to open a single door for myself. It almost didn’t happen at all, though.

I (very fortunately) thought we ought to do some advance packing on Saturday morning, and it was at that point that I noticed my passport wasn’t where I thought it would be. (In the pencil organizer on the library shelves.) Wasn’t that odd? It wasn’t in the lockbox either, or in a trumpet case in the basement. Or in a jacket pocket. J thought that maybe she’d seen it on my nightstand up in our bedroom. I explained to the boys how important it was that we find my passport, and Owen thought that he’d seen Felix playing with it. The same Felix that likes to throw things away. (True story: Yesterday Felix emptied two large bins of dried fruits, spices, and other kitchen items into the trash can. Everything was saved. That we know of)

A few panicked hours later (including a call to the State Department that fortunately did not go through) I found it behind some Latin books one shelf down from where I thought it ought to be. (From now on I’m just going to keep it in the lockbox.)

So, with a valid passport and three original birth certificates, we started driving to Toronto. The boys naturally had lots of questions. How long would it take us to get there? Would it be as long as driving to Pennsylvania? Would there be snacks along the way? At what point in the journey would we see the Eiffel Tower?

We had beautiful weather on the way out, and the boys particularly enjoyed going over the Grand Island bridges. Owen’s allergies were acting up, and he did tell us all (in a tragic voice) that his nose was so stuffy that he wouldn’t feel better until his life was over. As we came up to the Canadian border I explained how we were just about to enter into a foreign country. James contradicted this statement and assured me that Canada was a state. It was the top state on his map. We had a talk.

We also had a talk about how some of the road signs would be in French, and how they might hear people speaking French and even need to say “bonjour” or “merci” themselves. They practiced saying “bonjour,” “merci,” “s’il vous plait,” and “au revoir.” Owen couldn’t do it without adding “stupid” on the end. James was fascinated by the idea that some people spoke French all the time. Also, I don’t think that he believes that English is an actual language.

Owen spotted the Eiffel Tower (for the first of many times) just outside Niagara Falls.

The border crossing went smoothly, and we began to talk about what they might expect once we arrived at the ROM. (Royal Ontario Museum) Owen assured James that “it’s okay if we touch just one dinosaur skeleton. It won’t hurt anything if we just touch one.”

“No Owen, that isn’t okay. You absolutely must not touch any of the dinosaur skeletons.”

“Yeah, but they have lots of dinosaur skeletons, so it is okay if we just touch one.”

“NO, OWEN. Not even one.”

<inaudible whispers to James>

We drove by the CN tower, got stuck in a traffic snarl, and eventually parked in the basement of a luxury condo complex. (There was a Whole Foods in the basement.) I unpacked the kids, loaded Felix into the stroller, and wheeled them into the lobby. Then I realized that we were supposed to take our parking ticket with us, so we went back to the van. I got our ticket out of the van and we went back to the lobby. I checked Felix’s strap and realized he was soaking wet. So we went back to the van again, feeling slightly nervous about how I’d only packed him one extra outfit for the trip.

And THEN we were on our way.

The kids did great in the big city traffic. They held onto the stroller at crosswalks, watched out for pedestrians, and were polite to everyone we met. James helped me carry things, and Owen kept an eye out for the Eiffel Tower. (“Owen, that’s in Paris. It’s on another continent.) (“No, I see it!”)

The fossil exhibit at the ROM really was spectacular. They have some big sauropods, an enormous pterodactyl, an allosaurus, a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and, of course, a T-Rex. I’ve brushed up on a lot of dinosaur height and weight statistics over the past few years and it still doesn’t really prepare you for how big those things are up close. We also got to see a mammoth skeleton and (to James’ delight) a sabre-tooth tiger.

There’s plenty to see at the ROM besides dinosaurs, of course. There were fantastic exhibitions from Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and Felix made sure that I didn’t get to really look at any of it. (I took him out of the stroller after we passed through the dinosaurs, and from that point on he just wanted to push his George around in the stroller as fast as I’d let him. He was, however, into the dinosaurs. He made continuous roaring/growling noises throughout the whole display.)

Owen was decidedly not a fan of the Ancient Egypt section. He was scared out of his mind of the mummies (which he called “mommies”) and had a lot of questions about what would happen if they came out their “chrysalis.” He was a bigger fan, though, of Ancient Greece. He found two amphora lids with striped patterns and declared that they were pieces for checkers.

The worst moment of the trip, behaviorally, came when we stopped in the museum cafe for a coffee. I told the boys they could pick something out to eat, but that we were going to be sharing. I think they would have been fine if they’d each got their own treat. Instead, we got two treats--a donut that James picked out and a piece of tiramisu that Owen chose. They were like animals. I tried cutting off some bites for Felix, and when I turned around Owen was leaning over the table trying to stuff the entire plate of cake into his mouth with his hands. James wasn’t much better. But he didn’t, like Owen, wander off to grab a napkin and then sneeze in a stranger’s face.

Felix, for the whole trip, was completely uninterested in food. I think he was just distracted. He had a couple bites of cake, but then just people watched and pointed out all the babies that he could see.

We made one more pass through the dinosaur section and then walked back to our car to head over “to the hotel we’re going to live in.” This, for the boys, was the real highlight of the trip. We got ourselves parked, Owen got an arm trapped between two automatic glass doors, and then we made our way up to check in. I negotiated down the parking rate (parking is expensive in Toronto), and then we took the elevator up to our very own double bed room, which smelled slightly of damp carpet.

James and Owen took the beds, I brought the pack and play up for Felix, and I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. I figured this would be the simplest way to get everyone a decent night’s sleep. Within minutes their stuff was absolutely everywhere.

James had brought a miniature library of books about the Titanic and a couple of stuffed animals. Owen basically packed as many stuffed animals as he could fit into his backpack. James arranged his bed just so. Owen immediately was making acrobatic leaps from one bed to another. James objected every time he landed on “his” bed and messed up the covers. Felix just wanted a bottle. (I brought a quart of milk in a refrigerated pack and refilled plastic bags from the vending machines every 12 hours to give him bottles. We heated them up by running the coffee maker over the bottle without any grounds in it)

“We’re not going to nap,” I said “but I think we ought to have 30 minutes of quiet time before we do anything else.”

“Like swimming?”

“Yes, I need a little quiet time before we got swimming.”

TV on. Instant quiet time. They watched about 10 minutes of Star Wars. Fun fact, if you turn on Star Wars to the part where Luke and Han find out that Leia is on the Death Star you get to see about 10 seconds of Darth Vader, but all he does is stand in a hallway and look confused for a minute. James thought it was great and wanted to keep on watching. Felix and Owen both stood as close to the TV as they could without actually falling into it.

After I’d figured out how to get onto the hotel wireless (a big deal, since my phone was on airplane mode ever since the border) and checked in with J, I started changing them into swim trunks. We took an elevator down to the second floor, and Felix (who over the course of the day had been in an elevator about 12 times) did what he’d done on every trip: As soon as he felt it starting to move he ran over to me and buried his head in my legs, clutching my knees as tightly as he could. Except this time he confused me with the cleaning lady who we were sharing the lift with. I don’t know which of them was more surprised.

We finished stripping down in the locker room and showered off, then went into a sunny pool room full of big tropical plants. There was a decent sized cold pool and a little whirlpool tub in the corner, or as James and Owen described it “two pools!” One of the ways in which I’m not a great Dad is that I’ve done nothing to teach my boys how to actually swim. But they had a great time wading about and splashing. Felix and Owen both slipped and fell in multiple times, but neither of them seemed to mind after I’d fished them out. Felix just wanted to keep on walking around

Eventually another family came in and their son tried to play pool games with James (he was a much better swimmer) but had to settle for Felix, who ended up taking over their pool ball. (I tried to give it back, but the Mom insisted we keep it when Felix broke into tears. Canadians are so polite.)

We cleaned off and decided to head out for some dinner. The whole point of this trip, as far as the boys was concerned, was ordering a pizza. If you asked them to describe what we were going to do in Toronto, they would have said “We’re going to live in a hotel and order a pizza and go swimming and see dinosaur bones.” And the pizza was the nonnegotiable part of that. So we set of walking and looking for a place along Yonge Street where we could find a takeout pizza.

We walked a lot. And we didn’t see anything. But we did see a bunch of Lebanese places, and James got to asking me questions about what “shawarma” was. I described it, and he thought he might want to try to shwarma instead of pizza. Owen still wanted pizza. We walked another two blocks. Owen decided he could try shawarma too. Felix didn’t care about food at all. He kept seeing dogs and enthusiastically greeting them with a “HIII!!!”

We went into a shawarma place and got in line. Owen almost immediately cut his hand against the wall somehow and became a big sobbing mess until the head clerk offered him a beef sambusa. Somehow that made his hand feel better. And then James and Felix got free sambusas too, because Canadians are very nice.

We brought our spicy, garlicky, hot-saucy, raw-oniony shawarma back to the hotel room for the boys to reject and complain about. They devoured it. It’s amazing what the power of hunger (plus a long day and lots of walking and swimming) can do for picky eaters.

After dinner we FaceTimed with J for a few minutes, and then attempted to start putting them down to bed. James read Owen a Titanic book while Felix got another bottle, and I had the lights out by only an hour after their usual bedtime. My biggest problem that night was just being thirsty from the shawarma, and figuring out how to sneak out of the room to go get more ice for milk. Felix woke up once in the middle of the night and then passed right out again when I put a hand in his pack and play.

The next morning was all about cleaning up the colossal mess the kids had made of the hotel room. I turned on the TV again, and Owen found who SpongeBob SquarePants is. (He thinks he’s hilarious. He would have far preferred watching SpongeBob all morning to going to the Science Centre.) I picked up all their clothes and books and animals and got them dressed in going out clothes, then walked them to a little diner down the block for breakfast.

Our waiter was great and endlessly patient. He brought a booster for Felix right away and replaced our silverware every time the boys dropped theirs on the floor. (This happened about four times before I just asked to let them eat with their floor-dirty forks.) He advised that there would be enough pancakes on James and Owen’s orders that we wouldn’t need to order separately for Felix, and he chatted with James and Felix when I took Owen, who had assured me a dozen times at the hotel room that he really didn’t have to go to the potty, to the bathroom in a state of “I must go now or I’m going to explode crisis.”

I left Owen in the bathroom and checked on James and Felix. Two college girls haing breakfast in the back of the restaurant were giggling when I went back to the bathroom. Owen was screaming “DADDY! DAAADDYYY!” at the top of his lungs. The toilet had an automatic flush that was scaring him.

The food came and Felix ignored it. (There was a TV near us, and also two construction workers who kept talking to him.) James and Owen did a decent job on their pancakes, and my coffee wasn’t totally cold by the time I got a few sips.

We checked out of the hotel around 10 and drove over to the Ontario Science Centre. Huge parts of it were exactly how I remember from when I was 13...the Vandegraf Generator was in the exact same place, the marble run, and the play exhibit. The kids looked at bugs, experimented with barometric pressure, walked through a rainforest habitat, scaled a wooden bridge, found a turtle and multiple frogs, examined rock crystal formations, looked at aquariua, played with a wind tunnel, climbed through a cave, played with levers and fulcrums, zapped inert gases, banged on steel drums, and cranked engine parts. And that was all BEFORE the giant marble run. The best part for them, though, was the kidzone, because that was where they could get soaking wet. There was a big water table where you could do sundry experiments, and they were all soaked before we headed over to the planetarium.

It was in the planetarium where Felix finally reached the end of his tether. He basically hadn’t eaten anything in over a day and was in a big-kid exhibit. It was crowded because of all the school groups, and there was one particular group that we’d seen several times throughout the day that was rather ill-behaved. One group of girls had been playing tag in the lower levels, and apparently the game wasn’t over. A big girl ran up next to Felix, and then without looking where she was going took off running at full tilt and knocked him over, landing on him in the process. She ran off as soon as she realized what she’d done. I got him calmed down as best as I could (and found the girl and got an apology out of her) and asked the boys if they were ready to head home. We stopped at the Tim Horton’s on the way out for some coffee for the road and the one thing I could be sure Felix would eat--cheese.

We crawled through downtown Toronto in a rainstorm (you could still see the CN Tower clearly, though) and managed to find a Wendy’s just outside Missisauga where we got a little late lunch. There was another stop at Niagara on the Lake for souvenirs and a bathroom break, and we were back in our own house by 6.

I would do the ROM again in a heartbeat. It was a great museum, and the kids absolutely loved the dinosaurs. I think James got a lot out of the Science Centre (we had to find him a couple of times when he got interested in something and wandered off), but it was probably a bit over the heads of Owen and Felix. But anytime, and anywhere, I’d be happy to take these kids traveling and exploring again. They were champs about riding in the car, finding parking, and staying in a hotel room.

Final Owen quote, information he shared with the hotel clerk upon check-in:

“You know what’s weird about my Mom? She doesn’t even have a penis!”