Books and Trains (the good things in life)

Today Bluet and I went to Barnes and Noble (the American equivalent of Waterstone's). It is a veritable mecca for the parents and kids of the upper east side - especially on an unpromissing, foggy and cold day like today. Anyway, Mr Barnes and Mr Noble have decided that their 86th Street branch should be welcoming to kids, even if (a lot) of children's books get damaged by small hands but are not purchased. Whilst Bluet did no damage, I did buy myself a coffee, so I guess it works. Anyway, all of Manhattan was there - On the way in, we rode in the lift with a woman pushing an empty pram. My suspicions that she was therefore going into the shop to kidnap a child proved unfounded when she immediately found her child; however, why she had an empty pram remains a mystery. Then there was a middle aged man asking for help looking for 'one of those books with flaps' - whether for himself, or a youngster of his acquaintance, we shall sadly never know.

Like father (and mother), Bluet likes to read

Bluet finds an appropriate book. Unfortunately it is rubbish

Surprisingly, this shop is a particularly fun place to go as Bluet loves it - there is plenty of carpet for Bluet to explore whilst crawling*, small steps to climb up on and climb down from, book shelves to pull herself up on, places to sit down and remove her socks, books to pull off shelves, books to read and of course plenty of parents and children; the fun of going to Barnes and Noble is that all the other people fascinate Bluet - and many even smile at her and say hello - particularly, it seems the other dads looking after their kids on a Saturday - not so much the up tight new york mother and child having a temper tantrum because he wasn't allowed to keep all the trains (more later),  or the woman reading a celebrity gossip mag, until interrupted by the child in her charge, and forced to read a rubbish book about barbie doing ballet (and the child wasn't even hers - perhaps a niece?).

*Someone had also kindly spilled popcorn over the carpet, which, of course, Bluet wanted to eat. Even though I told her she wasn't allowed to eat popcorn from the shop floor.

Most excitingly today she played with the trains, as you can see here:

For a while she actually just played with the track, as the bratty boy mentioned above was keeping all the trains to himself and wouldn't share. Once he had been taken kicking and screaming from the shop (literally), Bluet got her hands on a locomotive - (Percy the green engine, for any Thomas the Tank Engine aficionados out there). She liked him very much: