Additional Stories

I have been informed that I must blog a bit more about our further adventures of the day at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

I took the day off so that I could burn some vacation time to get below the five-day limit for carrying over. One of the things we decided to do was to get some passes from the library, and one of them that Gaz most wanted to go to was the Nature Museum. So I checked that one out, and we went today.

A good time was had, but not always as the people intended. The museum is good stuff, particularly notable for its butterfly sanctuary, a big room with hundreds of butterflies. We were just looking at the first few exhibits on rivers when someone announced that they had a snake available to be touched in the other room, and we went to see. Gaz sat down with the rest of the kids, and listened to them talk about the corn snake (named Pumpkin for its pale orangey color, like pumpkin pie filling) (which led Gaz to comment that nobody would like snake pie) (except maybe a coyote or another snake predator), and she answered many of the questions the presenters asked. When one of the boys described a snakes movement as wiggling back and forth, she volunteered "I believe they call it 'slithering'," even. And she was first in line to touch the snake, and she petted it very politely and without the least bit of fear.

Of course, much of our time was spent in the Learning About Trees room, where the kids almost uniformly try to nest and care for these giant robin eggs (and steal them from each other, and house them in places other than the giant model "nest" and so forth). And Gaz, of course, got into the whole game. At one point, she and this other little girl were caring for the eggs, and they started talking about how they were dinosaur eggs. And then Gaz put her ear to one and said "Listen, you can hear them fighting!" The girl's mother asked who was fighting, and Gaz replied "Godzilla and Mothra!" The connection being Mothra and her eggs, of course.

Well, the mother didn't know who Mothra was, which kind of speaks more to our own disconnect, because I didn't realize there were still people out there who didn't know who Mothra was. Well, I had to step in and straighten the whole thing out, by admitting to her parents' geek cred. I have no idea what the mother thought at all that.

Those were the two that stand out in my head. There's possibly more, as she's always coming out with little sayings and phrases and observations, but at the moment, that's all I can summon up.