Run Fox Run

Leda and I took a trip to the New York Botanical Garden on the last day of this year’s Holiday Train Show. The lush conservatory gardens are loaded with 100%-organic replicas of various New York landmarks, and model trains and trolleys travel through and around them.

Like many of her friends, Leda is semi-obsessed with choo-choo trains these days. Jamie’s mom and I used to time our walks to the train station cafe to aid our kids’ trainspotting, and the model trains are always the most coveted toys at playgroup. On the third night of Hanukkah, Leda received her very own train set — Daddy spent hours designing a complex layout with several bridges and tunnels, which Leda promptly began rearranging. On the subject of train route design, like so many other things, we have much to learn.
Leda’s growing awareness of how the camera works means that most of the time when you try to take her picture, she wants to see the image displayed on the LCD screen, so we take a lot of blurry shots of a girl grabbing for the camera. Every once in a while she will stand still, but even then there is the risk that she will want to say “Cheese,” and present you with her “teeth-brushing” smile, which is more of a grimace:

Then again, since she was so fascinated by the trains in the Bronx, most of my shots were of the back of her head as she anxiously awaited the next arrival of the choo-choo, anyway. So perhaps it’s better to stick with the scenery, here a twig-and-vine mock-up of the very bridge we took to get to the Garden this morning.