Adventure Day, continued

The plan was to go to the zoo, but since we had two other moms and their kids (and an extra tagging along) with us, and there was rain predicted (which didn't materialize — it's a gorgeous day), we went to the Museum of Science.

(I'm going to digress here just a wee bit and point out how much I love the fact that the Belmont library lets you check out museum passes! We paid $5 each for the adults; the kids were all under 3 and so got in free. Even counting drinks to go with our lunch and the pricey Boston parking, I got out of there having spent less than $20. Hooray!)

The MoS is way, way cool — everything from a push-the-button exhibit showing basic mechanical principles to race cars to a life-size T-rex (and his footprint, Beth pointed out) to semi-precious stones (Beth looooves picking up rocks, and these were really neat rocks — she thought they were flowers at first!) to shells and butterflies and lots of computers and buttons for little hands to push. Bethie and I spent quite a bit of time talking about what a museum is, how it's a collection of things that are similar to each other in some way, and we sat down at a hands-on exhibit that let kids classify objects: sort them, put them in boxes, write on a small chalkboard attached to each box what it was a collection of. She gets, now, that the collection of shells sitting next to the TV from last week's beach trip is a kind of museum. I asked her, "Beth, if you could go see a museum of anything at all, what would be in it?" and she answered, right off the bat, "Trees. And dolphins." So I guess some of our next Adventure Days will have to be to Habitat and to the New England Aquarium. (I'd love to know what Sarah wants to see, but she's not telling us just yet.)

The best part of the visit was last: baby chicks actually hatching out of their eggs! We stood around (and stood around, and stood around) and eventually everyone else wanted to leave, but Beth and I wanted to stay. I even told the other moms to go home, but they didn't — and eventually we did walk away, to see the monkeys and change Sarah's diaper — and then we came back, and one of the chicks had pushed halfway out of the shell! It was all wet and scrawny looking, and obviously tired (come on, pecking a hole that big and working your way out of your own shell has got to be hard), but it would rest for a few minutes and then wriggle more to get further out of the shell. So, so amazing.

See, this is the kind of thing I want my kids to see. You can read about chicks hatching, or puppies being born, or see pictures of rivers or know that glass is made out of sand at very high temperatures, but until you actually see it up close and participate as much as you can, you don't really understand. This sounds pretty trite, as I'm typing it, but it isn't a very complex philosophy, and that's why we're doing Adventure Day in the first place.