Thursday, August 03, 2006

trip to the museum

C's spending the week at Camp Oma and Opa, which (along with the heat wave) made the idea of a trip to the (air-conditioned) state museum somewhat more enticing because his need to discuss the attributes of every model of fire truck used since 1850 wouldn't be hampered by A's need to "walk by self, walk by self, walking, walking, walking." Perhaps, though, if he had been there, she would not have inexplicably screamed in terror when we walked in the door (maybe the mastadont skeleton got her down?) and remain frantic until I begrudging took her to the mind-numbingly-boring "Discovery Place," designed for little kids who have no toys at home, and read her a book. After that she perked up and spent aeons (or did it just feel that way?) dropping plastic fruit down plastic tubes until, not surprisingly, she got hungry.

The only place we're allowed to eat in the museum is in the cafe, which is on the fourth floor; while there presumably are staircases to reach it, I don't know where they are, so we were limited to escalators and elevators. I knew she hated elevators, so we took the escalator; or perhaps I should say escalatorS, because they are set up so each run stops midway between floors and you need to turn around to get the the next set, just as stairwells are often designed in public buildings. This meant that there were actually six escalators between us and the cafe, and by number two she was starting panic. When we finally reached our floor (after all of about 30 seconds), I caved into her demands and let her know that we would NOT go back down on the escalators, which she repeated the entire time she ate her snack. The carousel distracted her briefly- not that she would RIDE it of course, but she enjoyed watching it go around and around and around and around and why didn't I bring a book? and around and....

Finally she tired of the carousel, which meant, of course, we needed to return to the first floor. She liked the elevator about as much as the escalator. It must have been a horrid 20 seconds for her, because the whole REST of the time we were at the museum I heard nothing but "no more escalator. No more elevator. All done escalator elevator. Bye bye escalator elevator." This may have been annoying enough as mere background noise, but she generally demands confirmation following her every utterance so I needed to drone "that's right; no more elevators or escalators" continuously as well. Plus, in order to overcome the trauma of the experience, we had to go back to Discovery Place, and I had to hand her the orange to drop down the tube about 50 times, and occasionally vary my response to "that's right, the cabbage doesn't fit down the tube" when appropriate.

It was nearing naptime (well, not really, but I had to factor in the mile-long walk to the car since I'm too cheap to pay for parking, and the inevitability of being stuck behind a bus on the way home) so I said, "We need to leave in 10 minutes." She stops (holding asparagus and an apple), frowns, and says "Stay 15 minutes" before returning to her task. Luckily she can't tell time, because we were outta there in 5.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Next time take Yeye. He and Alyra could have spent HOURS playing drop the fruit.