My mom was in New York this week from Texas on business and had Thursday off, so Aidan and I ventured into the city to spend the day with her. It was the first time I'd done anything so adventurous with him since I got pregnant, I've been so sick and nauseous, the latest thing has been a cold, and I felt a little overwhelmed going in that morning.

We missed our first train by ten minutes. The schedule had changed three days before. We came back an hour later for the next train, which proceeded to be 40 minutes late. I can pretty much go with the flow with things like this, but I have to manage visits to the bathroom and my food intake and I feared the extra 40 minutes would throw me off entirely.

Once the train came, we had a smooth trip to Penn Station. Aidan chatted away with a nice man next to him for the whole trip. He starts off by telling people that he's three, then that he lives at Grandma's and that he works with his pop fixing Grandma's house. The conversation could go anywhere after that. He told this man that he had taken the train yesterday to a march (I explained that it wasn't really yesterday) and that he didn't like it.

When we got to Manhattan, we took two subways to get to my mom's hotel near Grand Central. I know the route well because my father managed the Yale Club on Vanderbilt right across the street from Grand Central for many years and I find myself hearing his instructions in my head every time I have to go that way: take the 1, 2 or 3 uptown one stop to Times Square - get on the shuttle, a grey circle with an S, which takes you directly to Grand Central.

In Grand Central Aidan said he was hungry and we bought two blueberry bran muffins and set out a few blocks to The Roosevelt Hotel at 43rd and Madison. My mom stays in The Roosevelt on a regular basis and Aidan and I are both familiar with it. We called her on the house phone and then took the elevator up to her room on the sixth floor. We rested there a bit, ate most of our muffins, and then set out to The Museum of Natural History in a taxi.

We bought tickets to a planetarium show at 3:30 along with our museum admission, so we did some wandering (Aidan's only had eyes for the computers), went and had some lunch, and then saw the show, a sentimental thing narrated by Tom Hanks. Aidan had promised me that he would use the bathroom after the show, so we made right for a bathroom afterward, but once in there, my boy didn't want to go. We had a long discussion about that his pee needed to go in the potty and I didn't want him to have an accident in the museum which ended in him exclaiming, "NO! My pee doesn't need to go into the potty, my pee needs to CRASH INTO THE PLANET EARTH." I was laughing so hard that I decided he had won the argument and we set back into the museum. Then, the electricity went out. We were in the space section, which is all glass, so the full impact of it was not immediately apparent to us. The elevators were actually working as were some emergency lights. And, like almost everyone else who experienced the blackout, we first thought it was a fuse or something. People were pretty unfazed and continued to look around the museum. After awhile I overheard a museum employee telling some people that it was a blackout in the tri-state area. I didn't really believe it. Who could imagine such a thing?

Eventually, they started to gently evacuate the museum and I took Aidan across the street to Central Park so that his pee could crash into the planet earth. My mom bought three bottles of water and we spent the next two hours or more in the park. I felt lucky to stumble across a bathroom. Near the Met, we sat on a bench next to a man who managed to make a cell phone call out of the city. When he got off of the phone, he filled us in on the unbelievable scope of the blackout. We sat and talked with him for some time as people streamed by - some talking on cellphones, but many just holding them as if they were expecting a call.

My mom had a cellphone, but we had to try about 20 times before a call went through. Eventually I got in touch with Steve, who was supposed to have gone upstate for the day, but miraculously, hadn't. I told him that I needed him to come and get us and he sort of stammered, trying to explain that it was impossible, that the bridges and tunnels were closed. The electricity was still on where he was, so he was actually seeing the whole crazy thing on the news. At this point we were sheltered from the intensity of it, since we'd spent most of our time in the park. There might have been a time when being an island that made Manhattan very safe, but nowadays it makes it and the people who live and work and visit there terribly vulnerable.

Aidan played in a small park for a short time and my mom and I discussed whether we should walk to the hotel or try to spand the night in the park. The park was fairly lovely at that point and I was afraid that our electric room keys wouldn't work and then if they did that the room would be unbearably hot. My mom wanted to head back to the hotel, so when Aidan was ready to go, we headed downtown.

We were still sheltered from the chaos of the broken traffic lights because we were traveling down fifth along the park. I never told Aidan what a long walk we had ahead of us. We didn't even think about it much ourselves. We felt so grateful to not be stuck in an elevator or a subway. After awhile I started to notice the people walking with us. Many were exhausted and I started to realize that many of these people had probably experienced 9/11 and that this must be fairly traumatic, in spite of the apparent lack of serious danger.

We stopped to get ice cream from a park vendor and sat next to a woman who had been walking from the 20s (we were probably in the 60s at that point), trying to find a private bus to Brooklyn. I told her that my husband had told me that a sea of people were simply walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (he had actually said that it looked like the Marathon). She said that she had walked so far at that point that she could have been across the bridge by then if she had thought of it.

(to be continued...)