Natural History Museum Field Trip

Today's Quinn's class went on a field trip to the Natural History Museum and somehow I got tagged as a to go along as a chaperon. Normally that would mean another shot of that elephant in the lobby, but I've done that so many times I don't feel like I need to revisit that (plus I didn't get any good shots of it).


I should have realized what I was in for when we first got on the Metro and the teacher realized she had left the bag with all the kids lunches in it upstairs where we had been congregating. I volunteered to go get it and ran back upstairs, convinced the attendants to let me out of the pay area to get the bag and then somehow managed to make it back down and onto the train before the it left (I attribute this in part to my cat like quickness and the fact that it was an end metro stop and they probably have a scheduled departure time). Whatever the reason, I made it back the train took off about forty seconds after I got back on board. I was kind of surprised that a bag left unattended for what was probably fifteen minutes hadn't been picked up as being suspicious.


There's some sort of an thing on the mall for how to equip your house to use solar power on the mall at the moment. There were lots of different companies demonstrating different products all along the mall. Because of that the mall looks a bit cluttered and crazy with all the futuristic type house frames and whatnot on display.


The museum was a big hit with the kids. I think they liked the geological exhibits the best since that's where most of the interactive things were. In the photo above they're all trying to jump and generate seismic waves. The display in the upper right shows a visual display of vibrations, so all the kids were jumping to clutter up the display as much as possible.


I really should have bumped up the ISO for this shot. The wall looked terrible if you used a flash, but the ISO 200 speed took too long to capture the picture so the kids are all out of focus, but I do like the design on the wall (and so did the kids as you can tell).




After Quinn and I got home Ginger decided we should go to the grocery store and she could drop me off so I could take the kids to the park near Wegman's while she got groceries and picked up some prescriptions. I had suggested just staying at home with the kids, but that wasn't an option evidently. We didn't play at the park for too long since after we had been there ten or fifteen minutes both kids decided they had to use the restroom. So we had to walk to the grocery store and meet up with Ginger earlier than we expected. One of these days the kids will actually learn to use the restroom *before* we leave the house. Actually, who am I trying to kid? That's never going to happen.

And finally, I was hoping people could help settle a debate. If it's Wednesday and someone refers to "Next weekend", which weekend are the referencing?