Day at the Museum

I tried to convince the kids to go to The Botanical Gardens after speech therapy since the day was lovely enough to be outside in the children's garden, but Aleks would have none of it and insisted on visiting the Museum of Natural History instead. Thank goodness for that Happy Hollow membership. I don't know who ever did the research about that membership, but it is cheap and gets us in everywhere we want to go, just about.

We still only have two memberships, but we can get in more places than we used to. We keep a Botanical Gardens membership (at $65 per year) and we used to have a Museum of Natural History membership (also $65), but then one of the homeschooling moms posted in one of the local Yahoo groups about the Happy Hollow membership. It's the San Diego Park & Zoo and it's reciprocation is accepted all over town. Plus, while the park was closed for major renovations, the membership was only $75 for 2 years.

Now, I don't plan on going to San Diego any time soon, and I do feel bad about not keeping my money in our local institutions, but I had to weigh that with the fact that I can't afford much. We could continue only being able to visit MNH & the Botanical Gardens, or I could forgive this one little lapse of everything local and be able to visit the zoo, the Great Lakes Science Center, MNH, the Columbus Zoo (at half price) and Cosi. It also gets us into the Children's Museum in Dayton for when we visit the grandparents.

Aleks is a sheep in wolf's (or coyote, as the case may be) clothes.O-hi-o-hi-o. Round on the ends, high in the middle. Here I try to explain what the heck it means to have a state bird, a state flower, and a state tree. Not sure I was very clear on the matter myself.
We arrived early enough to enjoy the Discovery Center for once and spent the time looking through microscopes (I'd really like to get one for us at home, but don't have the cash to spare), talking to the Center's Coordinator about everything there plus how Aleks & she had the same book about Evolution and how much he liked it, and checking out the Center's pets (including a leopard gecko named Speedy).
The Center closes before the museum, so when they began closing up, we went upstairs to see the dinosaur fossils (Bastian pointed out that his favorite dinosaur is the Triceratops while Aleks' is the Tyrannosaur). Aleks took a closer look at Lucy since we'd recently read several books about her discovery. He was impressed that the real Lucy was discovered by a team from the museum.
We went outside to see the animals. This crow was dragging around a shovel.




Aleks told me jokes.

These mushrooms were growing from between the slats of a bench outside.
Afterward, we spend quite a long time climbing on Steggie the Stegosaurus as always and I took a self-portrait, as usual.
Bastian helped Aleks out.