The Museum

The field trip yesterday was great fun! We had enough adults along that we each only had charge of 3 kids and that was the perfect size group for touring. Also, we didn't have very much time to look at all the exhibits, but that worked out well with the attention spans of 4- and 5-year-olds. My group wanted to see the dinosaurs first, but it turned out at the end that their favorite exhibit was the "cave" where they saw gems and minerals. There were also lots of hands-on exhibits that were fun for this age group.

We looked at the Hall of Wildlife and I explained to Emmelia when she asked that the animals were real, but were dead and had been stuffed so we could look at them and see what they are like. So later when we came to the exhibit on Native American Cultures and saw a full-size dummy of a Navajo woman weaving a rug, Emmelia very sadly said "why did she have to die?". Ha! She thought the museum had killed and stuffed the poor Navajo woman so we could look at her. My kids are going to grow up to be authors of horror novels, I can tell already.

I decided, while looking at a camel that had been prepared like the humans in the BodyWorlds exhibit, that maybe I don't need to see that exhibit. I'm a scientist and all, and interested in anatomy and biology, but do I really need to see a skull cut into 3 slices with each slice in a different position? It's just.... odd. And although I respect that the people involved donated their bodies for this purpose, it still seems a little like going to see humans torn alive by wild beasts in the Coliseum. So maybe some other time. Besides, the lines on a Thursday morning were longer than lines for a ride at Disney World!