1. Journaled about the favorite animals she saw, including polar bears, caribou, and otters. Thank you, Sid the Science Kid, for giving me an excuse to sit down for five minutes in between trips to run up and down the hall to the planetarium. This also gave me an excuse to encourage her to think about whether they had long legs or short legs, long tail or short tail, horns or no horns, etc. And we had a rather enlightening conversation about what the Inuit might use polar bears for, and exactly why Pop-Pop hunts the deer on his farm.
2. Visited the outdoor (live) animal exhibits for the first time. The deer and turkeys were pronounced "cool," the hawks were a good excuse to see if we could identify which variety lives near our yard, and the otter was the biggest hit. Liza insisted on using my camera to take photos while it was rapidly swimming laps up to the window and back, which means I have a dozen photos of streaming bubbles and otter asses. At least this one has a picture of the photographer in the reflection.
3. Completely failed to notice that Righthand Raccoon was humping the daylights out of Middle Raccoon while we were walking past. This picture was from a few minutes later (on our second pass through to see the otters), and doesn't Righty look like the phrase should be "raccoon ugly" instead of "coyote ugly?"
4. Visited the dinosaurs, which was the initial intent of this whole trip. Liza announced yesterday at 2pm that she wanted to go to the dinosaur museum, but I couldn't stomach the thought of driving for an hour, going to the museum for an hour, then fighting downtown traffic all the way home. Instead we had a pretend dig for dinosaur bones on her bed (mixed wooden spools in with wooden blocks on her bed and she used a plastic basket to sift through the "dirt" for the "bones") and went today. Liza wanted her photo taken with the triceratops, especially once I pointed out that it starts with "tri," just like the triops. It's never to early to start learning the meanings of prefixes, now is it? When, later in the day, someone in the gift shop asked her whether the dinosaurs liked Liza's sparkly shoes, she scornfully informed them that dinosaurs aren't alive.
5. Wanted to read every book in the kids' section of the gift shop, except for the one seriously twisted Gary Larson book that I kept out of her sight (and then bought for myself because duuuude, this is soooo not appropriate for children - check out the synopsis on the Amazon page I linked to).
2 comments:
Thanks for the alert on the Gary Larson book (it has only been out for a decade, but it is new to the clueless among your readers). We have the Farside anthology from when my wife used the cartoons to teach evolution at the local college. But we were missing this book. - Thanks.
When you need a laugh:
http://www.morenewmath.com/
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