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Sleep under the famed blue whale
Sleepover at museum stirs mommy memories of simpler times
NEW YORK - Flashlight. Check. Sleeping bags. Check. Jammies. Hmmmm ... what's appropriate for a night camped out under a whale?
As I prepared to join a hearty legion of parents and kids on a sleepover at the American Museum of Natural History, I felt my enthusiasm turn lukewarm when my 8-year-old daughter ripped into the confirmation packet that arrived in the mail.
There were copious checklists, maps and FAQs for our much-anticipated, sold out "Night at the Museum," a hot ticket among 8- to 12-year-olds after the blockbuster movie of the same name — filmed at Natural History — hit theaters in 2006.
Our night involved unfurling our sleeping bags on eyeball-to-eyeball rows of cots with 357 of our closest friends under the museum's famed blue whale, while other groups were assigned a mammal diorama room or cots next to big rocks in the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth.
Score, I thought. We got the whale. But could I hack it? Surely I wasn't the first mom or dad to wonder if the evening would push me to my grumpy place. I decided to take comfort in numbers.
Around the country, from the San Diego Zoo to the Battleship New Jersey, packs of kids and their grown-ups have been scooping up tickets and heading off to their favorite museums, zoos, aquariums and historic sites for sleepovers.
The programs emerged several years ago and appear to be here to stay as the institutions come up with new ways to freshen the evenings and accommodate ever-growing crowds.
"Some people have always dreamed of sneaking away and coming out to explore `their' museum once it was closed up for the night and the crowds had disappeared," said Brad Harris, Natural History's senior director of visitor services. "There's a real sense of ownership of the place when you're looking into dark corners with your flashlight that you don't experience when you're sightseeing with the crowds during the day time."
The cavernous Natural History has offered its sleepovers since January 2007 on the coattails of the Ben Stiller movie. The evenings have grown so popular, the museum opened new rooms to accommodate more people and added craft activities and carts stocked with small artifacts such tortoise shells and stuffed birds for a little touch-and-tell.
"It worked out to be more successful than anyone could have predicted," Harris said. "As soon as we announce a new set of sleepover dates they fill up almost immediately."
My daughter couldn't wait for the after-dark flashlight fossil hunt among the bones of dinosaurs and early man. She couldn't wait to pad around the museum in her slippers. She noted the solar map project in the Cullman Hall of the Universe, a walk through the Butterfly Observatory — a special T-shirt!
I couldn't find the ear plugs I bought three months before, when I made the reservation.
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Snore strip. Check.
Not all sleepover programs involve crowds as large as ours.
In Philadelphia, at the smaller Independence Seaport Museum, the minimum sleepover is 80 people, with a maximum of 140. The two-floor, carpeted museum on the Delaware River has been offering sleepovers for four years, changing the themes each year to keep them viable.
This year's theme was pirates. In previous years, the focus was on the famous hunt for the lost Civil War vessel the Alligator, the U.S. Navy's first submarine.
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