Visit to the National Mystery Museum to Honor Lavinia's Birthday

Because I can't get out of the house or even dressed at a reasonable hour, it is an excellent fact that the Natural History Museum is open until 10 on Wednesdays. We still had free passes for guests from when we first signed up for our membership, and the kids haven't seen friends in what seems like ages, so we took the whole family plus Ana, Jonas, and Lavinia. Jonas told his mom that it was the National Mystery Museum, which just sounds like something out of Scooby Doo to me.

Jon swears that Bastian called this stuffed bobcat "mountain cat," but I have no idea where he would have gotten the point of reference to combine those two words. Plus he's never said "mountain" before and of course we couldn't get him to replicate it. I bet he said something like "mouth" or even gibberish along the lines of "look at" or "that's a." Jon refuses to be swayed however.

Googly-eyed bird.
The boys liked all these beetles a lot.
And the entomologists really have a sense of humor.

Bastian and Lavinia (who is now four and thinks that everything she's been doing lately has been in honor of her birthday) admired the giant topographic map of Ohio, feeling every little nubbin (briefly). The kids found the dinosaur skeletons the most interesting, especially when considering their size compared to other things (like themselves or our house). Aleks remembered from our newsletter that there was a new triceratops skeleton and was excited to find it and point it out to everyone. Of course, we have no pictures of them with the dinosaurs. They did not at all care for the exhibit about Native American mounds in Ohio and got extremely riled up by dancing on these seats during the film:
I guess Bastian thought this rock looked yummy.

Most of the time spent at the museum was dedicated to turning this planetary exploration machine into a spaceship bridge where they could send torpedoes to the moon to blow it up. Aleks had Captain names for everyone too, which I'm pretty sure he made up on the spot.
They would stop blowing up the moon ever so often when they unknowingly managed to click on something intended for clicking, which launched a animated probe to explore the surfaces of varying planets. Once it got to the part of looking at craters on Mercury, however, they again lost their interest, returning instead to interstellar warfare.Aleks and I laid on the floor to stare at this giant photo (painting?) of a galaxy (which was not specified where we could see it).

After the real stuffed Balto (the famous Siberian Husky sled dog who led his team on the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome) did not remotely capture the attentions of our inter-galactic warrior children, we resorted to the coin vortex for amusement.

Aleks did not want to let the quarter escape. He wanted to take it home to put in his money jar. Poor Aleks, it went to charity instead.