A couple of weeks ago my daughter Mariana and I spent a night at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Just as in the eponymous movie, we slept (actually not much) surrounded by dinosaurs, stuffed grizzly bears and Teddy Roosevelt.
When I signed us up for the event through Mariana's school some months ago it seemed like a fun way to spend a Friday night. Little did I realize I would end up after a long work week trying to sleep on a hard cot under a giant blue whale with the entire Hannah Montana fan club shining flashlights in my face.
That was the bad part. The good part was getting to spend time with just my daughter on an adventure back through time. As we walked through darkened dinosaur halls with only Mariana's flashlight to guide us, the city outside the museum's walls began to fade away. Every turn revealed a new creature which somehow managed to walk the earth without the aid of Nikes, iPhones or Juicy Couture.
Long after my sore back recovers from our "Night at the Museum", we will both remember our night running through galleries, making pretend jewelry with the gemstone collections, walking back through 13 billion years of the universe's history, making faces at the stuffed bears and trying to figure out where we would run if we had a Velociraptor on our tail. More than anything I will remember the simple joy of just being together with neither cell phone nor Gameboy to interrupt us.