We had a wonderful museum day today.
I caught up with Formula for the most part (didn’t finish the race) and took a shower. He slept until 9:12. I dressed him, and he went and admired himself in the mirror: “Good…you dressed me up good.” We went down to breakfast in the hotel. He and Carly used the pancake machine to make a pancake. That was pretty cool. As they walked away, another kid told them another pancake was coming.
We were back to the room before 10. In the elevator August was taking too long to push the button so I reached over his head and did it. He didn’t see what happened, and thought the machine had chosen for us. So back in the room he had us act the elevator thinking for me, after I didn’t push the button in the elevator.
We got going up to the museums. Carly had ordered an 11 o’clock entrance to the Seuss museum for us, so when we got up about 10:30 we first went to the natural history musuem. He liked looking out at the big tyrannosaurus, then he and Carly made earthquakes with a machine. We looked at the minerals and crystals and then I sat down and worked on our BECU stuff while they looked around a bit more.
It was then 11 so we headed over to Seuss. The Seuss museum was really busy, so he spent a lot of time just wondering around, saying it was too busy. I lost them for a few minutes as I looked at the Theodore Geisel exhibits upstairs. I really liked some of the individual pictures and family cards he had drawn. Eventually though we found a video of The Butter-Battle Book playing. It was near the beginning, and August sat down to watch. The sound from the TV was incomprehensible, so I narrated the story for him for awhile. For awhile it was self-explanatory enough, then when it got to the last weapon I heard him narrate the weapon creation process for himself. We talked about the ending, and he had an amazed look on his face when he realized they were equally powerful at the end. I suggested that ‘stalemate’ was the word of the day and we discussed what it meant, and in chess.
The crowds had calmed down and we went around some more. The main thing he did was the McElliot’s pool activity where you decorate a fish, then push a button and it swims across a big screen that looks like an aquarium. He did 20 fish or so.
Then he was done. Carly and I both liked it, but thought it needed one more floor of activities to be really substantial. Lots more Seuss stories that could be covered. We also saw the new mural, after the one from I Saw It on Mulberry Street was taken down due to the Chinaman character.
We went outside to find that they had dance music playing and a big bubble machine going. August ran through the bubbles a bit, but mainly he just stared at the bubbles, entranced.
We went back to the natural history museum. I got my debit card to work. He saw the donation box and told Carly he wanted to give more money to the museum. We went upstairs to the area we had started in before and repeated some of the stuff and looked at the T-Rex again. He pointed to the big humerus bone in a display case down below and told Carly it was from a dinosaur that was twice as big as the T-Rex. She asked how he knew that. We had looked in there earlier when she had gone to the bathroom. It was from an herbivore, like an allosaurus or the such, that was said to be up to 92 feet long, compared to the 40 feet of the T-Rex.
We found a balloon artist without any customers. August was intrigued, but asked if her balloons had helium. She said no, in fact they aren’t allowed in the museum, but he still said no. Carly asked some advice on how to get into balloon animal making and the woman gave some pointers. August watched while she made a sword for another kid, then he chose an alien hat. He wore it for a few seconds, then it went on the stroller. But he really liked watching.
He didn’t want to go in the Clifford the Big Red Dog exhibit, but when we went down the stairs there was someone in a Clifford costume. And August loved it. He was trying to figure out if it was a person or real, and started looking for evidence. He saw the zipper, but said it had a tail, and toes. He felt it, and a couple times he said it felt like someone was inside, but he wasn’t sure. He asked Clifford a bunch of questions, and gave him a hug and high five. It was soooo cool.
We then went downstairs to the animals/aquarium area. This was my favorite part. August really liked the exploration drawers, where you pulled them out and found all sorts of things: bones, sea stars, shells, etc. etc. Watched a little of a catfish video, then went to the bathroom. We walked around the rest and got going.
We ate lunch at the nearby cafe. Carly ordered (sandwiches for us, and mac and cheese, soup, and apple sauce for August) and August and I claimed a table outside. We heard a balloon pop. As we left, we realized it was the alien part of our hat; it had gotten hot in the sun and popped.
Now, he saw someone in a Cat in the Hat outfit and went over and talked to it for a minute and gave it high fives.
We next went into the art musuem. We explored three of the galleries pretty fully: the middle one, the American painting one in back, and a more contemporary gallery on the right. We spent a lot of time looking at the big mural painted in the 40s. Carly explained it to him and he was most interested in how the artist won a contest to paint it.
He was hungry and talked about having “Snunch” (the term we had coined for having snacks for lunch). We left at 2:20.
We drove and drove and drove. We read the next Hilde book in there. About 15 minutes from Concord August started asking about a gas station for a bathroom. We got to the hotel after 6:30. He was looking desperate, so I told her to stop out front, and I grabbed him and ran in. We made it. He talked about pee making things sticky, and suggested “A tiny suction cup in the pee.” We did the boingy, boingy, boingy, bounce game, then left before 7.
We spotted a Chinese restaurant and decided to go there. We got lo mein and shrimp and pea pods and a couple of spring rolls. He suggested something to us and said “Oh yes, I thought so. I thought you would.” Dinner was good, then we walked into town. We saw the capitol building and Carly realized that the clicking of her backpack straps made an echo. We got August out of the stroller to run out some energy. He ran around for about 5 minutes. We walked farther up through town.
There was a storm off in front of us so we turned back. We stopped at a square and saw an odd sculpture of Lincoln and a crow. We then got to the clock tower, and when August found out that it rang at each hour he wanted to wait, even though it was 26 minutes. We waited 26 minutes. He was very patient about it, and very happy when it went off at 9. We headed back and got back to the hotel at 9:10.
Carly gave him a bath. Put his pajamas on, then she took a shower. I was lying on the bed, and he climbed on it, and on my back, and said he was a massage machine. He ws then a tattoo machine: “you earned three tattoos…one heart, one flower, one circle…Every time you get two massages you get three tattoos they are different.” “Calculator, telephone, and round red button.”
We finished the Hilde book and read 10 chapters of a Captain Underpants book. He said “You should really stick to what you know, like tea parties…you know, the mean-agers.” It was a line from Hilde.
Once again he was having trouble going to sleep with Carly. I took him over on the other bed, and after some more struggling and talking about how we go to sleep, he fell asleep to my left, lying on my arm. I fell asleep too, then woke up a bit later. I rolled him from the edge of the bed and made a pillow wall on the other side of him. I think we fell asleep a little after 11.
