Oh right, this thing...

I'd wandered off for a while.  I forget to post.  If I could compose posts in my head and magically send them here, I'd be set, but having that chip installed just seems creepy.

We took Ben and Lily to the Natural History Museum in Washington DC yesterday.  Julianna decided to go to school instead, since she isn't one to enjoy looking at dead things.  Ben, on the other hand, is.  We had to start by looking for the mummy.  I recalled from my younger days that there was a mummy in the Western Civ area, but I feared it had been pulled out of "cultural sensitivity."  I remember it as a pretty grotesque, female, mostly unwrapped, in big glass box kind of thing.  That, in fact, is gone.  There IS a mummy (so they say), but it's all wrapped an covered w/a mask, and not at all gawk worthy.  But at least I didn't have to tell Ben there was no mummy.  He was more impressed with the bull mummy, anyway.  They've also removed what had been MY favorite display as a child--the human sacrifice and trephenation exhibit in the South American cultures area.  There had been this big pyramid of skulls and lots of skulls with holes cut in them...Ben would have plotzed.  Hmpf.  Stupid cultural sensitivity.  I want the freak show!

Luckily, the museum is just chock FULL of skeletons of things.  My favorite display was a bare tree with 7 or 8 bird skeletons perched in it.  What the hell happened THERE?  Steve pointed out that all the displays were painted these bright cheery colors to distract us from the fact that there was this skeleton army poised to hop out of the trees and from behind the glass and exact its gory revenge...  And why, exactly, is there a human skeleton wrestling with a goat skeleton?  Is this how they found the bodies?  Dinosaur bones now seem kind of hacknied and no one really cared.  The giant sloth skeleton gives one pause, though.  I mean:

"When it lived during the late ice age, the adult giant sloth weighed about 3 tons and reached a height of about nine feet on all fours and about 20 feet it stood upright on its back legs. It probably had long, coarse reddish-brown hair and foot-long irretractable claws that forced it to walk on the sides of its hands."

ahem.

As is so often the case, though, the big hit was the Metro.  On the way back, we had most of a car to ourselves, so Lily just ran around like a nut.  Surprisingly good at keeping her feet under her.  Born subway surfer.


It was a really nice day.  Since Steve came, we were back to a man-to-man defense instead of my usual...what do they call it in football where you just yell all the time and get a headache and yank one kid while you catch another and mutter curses under your breath and vow never to do this again?  email me.

Tonight, Steve and I have four hours to ourselves!  I signed the kids up for the Y's "Parents night out".  It was too expensive, but they'll take all three for four hours.  We're going out for Ethiopian and no one will be whining, "It's too spicy...I don't like beans...What's for desert...Why is that man wearing a dress?"  Then we'll...I dunno, sit in silence?

What's bugging me today:  Why, on the show "Franklin," does only Franklin get a name?  Everyone else "Goose" or "Bear" or whatever.  Can there only be one of each sort of animal per town?  And why is "Beaver" a girl?  That's just so obvious, isn't it?  Give us some credit, people.  Yeah, that's the stuff I need preserved.  When my kids have gone off to college, I need to be able to look back and know that I thought to write down my musings on children's programming.