Free Day Field Trip

The girls and I had a great time today on a field trip! I knew the art museum was having an "Animals In Art" exhibit that is actually going to be ending soon and I had wanted to get the girls to that. I looked it up online and found out it was FREE and that clinched the deal for me :) I did not know though that the art museum is actually in the Cultural Center which also has the History Museum and Science Center in it. All that too was FREE!! So, we got 3 museums and then the added bonus of Barnett Park which is right next door and has a cool water thing the kids could play in----yep, that too was FREE (We just LOVE it here!!!)


Lucy will be taking Zoology in Co-op this year and we got her book last week and that has been a huge hit!! Her and Clara can look at that cover to cover over and over again! So, I figured this exhibit loosely tied in to that. This painting was amazing!!! It is oil on canvas and HUGE! The elephants look real and there is so much detail to all of it you could look at it all day and probably not see it all :) The girls loved this one.

Here is river otters and the girls fell in love with it! They don't photograph as well of course, but it was really great and they looked so real!
We looked at this painting for a long time (well relatively long with a 3 year old around ). What amazed me about it is that it is acrylic! Lucy noticed all the details of the birds shadow and the different colors used in the leaves. I like that this place had a lot of the art work low enough for the girls to really see it and be able to stand close to see the minute details and then stand back to see the big picture. Upstairs they also had a section of kid art that was really great too. Lucy was amazed that many of the artists were just a couple of years older than her. She came home and drew a picture and paid so much attention to the detail of it all, so that was very good. I also had her write a paragraph about what we did today and she has enjoyed reading that to Daddy.

Oh, in other news, Lucy lost a tooth today. That was the other big news to tell Daddy :)

We went through the history museum pretty fast, but this contraption caught all of our attention. It is hard to see in the picture, but it is how they would give a perm back in the 1930's. They even had a picture of a little girl hooked up to it. All those clips hanging down would clip onto the hair curled up and then there is a fan up top that would blow the hair dry. I am so thankful we live in the day and age that we do now!! I was trying to explain it to the girls and had to laugh because I had a great example of Clara's hair being the before and Lucy's hair being the after :)

In the Science Center the girls got to see some real animals which is always a big hit!! This is a snapping turtle the girls are posing with. God thrilled us once again by having us there at just the right time and we got to see them feed the snakes. I have never seen this myself and it was fascinating. A snake can get a mouse or rat down rather quickly which was very impressive. The girls had a mixture of disgust and aw over this and we watched about 5 snakes eat and they had enough. The man who was doing the feeding was great and was so informative and he enjoyed that we enjoyed it so much :)

While we were here it was so cute, there was a boy named Ben that was being called by his mom and Clara got so excited and looked at me and said "My big friend is here!" Too cute!! My friend Kathy came over last week with her 3 boys and the oldest is Ben who really took a liking to Clara and was so great with her. Clara is still talking about that and so when she heard that name she just knew it had to be her "big friend" (he is 11) :)