T-Rex and Affect
For a long time Dave and I have talked about taking the boys to the Natural History Museum. We’ve seen advertisements all over town of a T-Rex skeleton that looks like the showpiece of every museum-themed movie I saw as a child and I would look at said signage and think:
“you know what? I AM gonna take my kids to see that dinosaur skeleton! No one ever took me to see any dinosaur skeletons and I will NOT have my children missing out on such excitement!!”
Night at Museum
And so it came to pass, that on Saturday the Hollis Family Five packed up our mom-car and drove to the museum. I brought my camera along to show you my parenting at its best…
Daddy & The Boys
Look at me taking my well dressed children to an educational outing… Look at me packing healthy snacks for them to enjoy while they observe important things like SCIENCE and HISTORY… Look at us doing things for our offspring our own parents NEVER did for us…
Pride cometh before the fall dear reader, and we hadn’t even cleared the end of our street before I was already wishing California had a liberal open container policy because I would have happily replaced the water in my eco-friendly bottle with some chilled vodka!!
Bear With Me
Diorama
It wasn’t that the kids were being naughty, it was just that they were being kids and there are three of them and only two of us and I quickly realized why our parents never took us to museums… because toting multiple children around a space filled with breakable things is as tiring competing in Iron Man… but at least in Iron Man someone gives you a medal and a trip to Hawaii.
Learning & Growing
If I’m honest with myself the museum was really really cool. There were all sorts of fun things for the boys to see and do and experience. If you live in or around LA I can’t recommend it enough as a family outing. Just be prepared, like with all kid-focused locales there will inevitably be something even harder to handle than your own children… other people’s kids!
There was a crush of sticky hands and temper tantrums and parents vehement whispers of “I will take you back to the car, I really will!” There was a show called, something like “Dinosaur Experience” that killed my four year olds belief that I was a good and honest person because when he asked “are there real dinosaurs in here” I said “of course not buddy, dinosaurs are extinct” but then I didn’t read the description of the show we were about to watch in the darkened room. So when a giant T-Rex came careening around a corner growling, whether or not it was actually a highly trained puppeteer who’s legs were clearly visible, my son was terrified and therefore scarred for life. Add it to the list of things to tell the therapist about me when he’s older: # 1 Never Let Me Have Pop Rocks for Dinner #2 Allowed Me to Be Nearly Eaten by a Supposedly Extinct Carnivore
Picture Fail
The above photos are from the one moment I begged the boys to indulge me in a photo session because since I’m the one behind the camera, I never get good shots of us… Saturday was no exception. The picture below is another failed attempt… you can see the crazy in my eyes as I’m about to take out my aggression on my husband instead of on the true people to blame… the board at the museum who refuse to serve alcohol to the masses of parents who clearly need it while they spend an afternoon pulling their toddlers out of the coyote diorama.
Crazy Eyes
The day was a lesson in endurance, of keeping my cool. There were the tears when I told Jackson we had to leave the coloring table he’d come upon mere feet inside the door.
Dino Picture
“But I want to color” he said affronted.
“I know man, but we just got here and there’s so much cool stuff to see, you can color at home…” I tried
“You never let me do ANYTHING!” He said placing his T-Rex drawing in the tray dramatically.
I looked around me at the chaos of screaming children and dinosaur bones, and questioned why I was here when I could be knee-deep in a glass of ice tea and a novel about a vampire love triangle, but NO, I’m here, letting my kids experience history!!
Long Day
The shot above is my favorite… Dave was trying to get the picture of Sawyer looking through a telescope but captured me in the throws of full yawn. I laugh when I think of similar shots of my own mother on trips to Disneyland, or any other family outing looking similarly exhausted. She too could have been somewhere else reading about the vampire love triangle… or whatever the 1986 equivalent of vampires was, but she was there with us, waiting in line, and fighting temper tantrums and enduring the chaos so that I could have the sweet memories I do of family outings.
Bone Deep
And so I’ll stop complaining, stop venting here to you because I know that just like me, my boys wont remember that mommy and daddy were exhausted by the time they got back home… they’ll only remember our family, en-masse, learning about Dinosaur bones and traipsing illegally through the diorama of African Mammals.
So we did it, we endured the family outing… but rest assured, a bottle of wine was opened as soon as we returned back home. And the vampire? He beat out the werewolf, of course.
