Museum Adventures

After visiting the Museum of the Rockies a few weeks ago on a free visit day, I went ahead and purchased an individual membership this morning.

Alex loves dinosaurs, but the dinosaur exhibit with the huge creatures and low grumbling dino sounds was really scary this morning. We were the first ones there when the museum opened, so we were all alone in the hall with the giant beasts. I can't blame Alex for running back out of the room, I felt like doing the same thing. Instead, I picked him up and we quickly walked on to the less scary hall of horns and teeth (yes, actually less scary!). There is a baby protoceratops that looks and sounds like it's asleep, breathing softly. It's little and cute, and one of Alex's favorite parts.

From there we went on to a hall filled with beautiful fancy rocks. Alex wasn't particularly interested in them today, but we stopped long enough to take a picture in front of some giant quarts crystals for geologist grandad.

Alex insisted then on returning to the original scary dinosaur hall, but upstairs where you can look down on them instead of having them towing above. There were some other little kids in the room by then, too, so it was much less terrifying than earlier.

With membership comes admission to the planetarium, so we went to a special Saturday morning children's program I thought Alex would enjoy. It was a cute narrative about all the neat things like ladybugs you can find in your backyard and the story of two bear constellations and Leo trying to eat their tails. Alex sat very still on my lap through the entire thing. When it ended he burst out crying. I think he had been scared stiff through the show, and let all that tension out when the show ended. I'm not sure I'll take him to one of those again soon.