Children’s Museum

Being a Dad is cool in a lot of ways. One of them is that you can disappear with the kids for the day doing something fun and get all kinds of brownie points. I took the kids down to the Children’s Museum today. Amy was appreciative and apparently some of her Mom friends are jealous. (Dad doing air travel alone with the kids earns more brownie points, however. Probably a level of difficulty multiplier or something.)

Cole, Harper, & I had a great time. We started in the dinosaur section, doing some “fossil” work, then made our way up to the dragon subsection of the dinosaur section. One of the points stressed was how people not knowing much about fossils and finding a dinosaur fossil might start conjuring up dragon myths. They had a little group activity where someone would describe a mystery fossil only they had been allowed to see. Cole volunteered to be the one who described the fossil – then everyone came up with different drawings based on the one description and then the mystery fossil was revealed. Kind of like a paleontology sketch version of “telephone.”

After that, we just generally wandered around. Being a parent is a lot easier when you can pretty much let the kids go where they want knowing that there will be an activity that’s reasonably fun, active, and educational just around the corner. Eventually we made our way to the Power of Children exhibit. This one is not all fun and games, to say the least. It contains sections with Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White.

They are tough subjects for kids, but I’ve never had any intent to hide these sorts of things from my kids. I think they need to be aware of the dark side of the world, I think they’ll be aware of it anyway, and I think they are more durable than we give them credit for. Still, it’s awfully tough to explain Nazis to a six year old. (I’m singling out Cole because I think he pretty much grasped the situation. Harper’s still young enough that a lot of it went over her head.) He just can’t fathom how and why people would be so mean to other people. I know the explanations, but I’m not sure I really understand it either. Maybe it’s common to all kids to one degree or another, but watching him grapple with the subject, it felt like he was every inch my boy. I can still remember wrestling with the question of why people can be so horrible to each other when it’s so utterly easy to be nice to one another.

There were pictures of a Nazi gathering with a lot of people with their hands up saluting Hitler. He asked if they were all bad guys. I told him that there were only a few bad guys and a whole lot of people who were too afraid or too unaware to stand up to the bad guys. He observed that the Anne Frank story was a pretty sad story. I agreed, but pointed out that it was important to learn about these kinds of stories so that maybe the next time there were bad guys getting control of things, we’d remember what happened before and stand up to them before they got a chance to do such horrible things. We also talked about how people who are mad or angry or scared sometimes blame their problems on people who are different.

The Ruby Bridges section was about a girl who integrated a New Orleans school. There was a short live performance where an actor from the Children’s Museum told the story, then took questions. Sure enough, Cole volunteered a comment to the effect that Martin Luther King had solved that problem of people being mean to other people because they looked different. The boy certainly is not afraid to share his thoughts. The actor told him that the problem wasn’t entirely solved but Dr. King had done a lot to help the situation.

After that, we moved on to happier places at the Museum. They said they wanted to stay for the end of business parade, but that was about an hour off. The kids were still behaving themselves, but were starting to look a little vague. I was tired too. So, we left at about 4 and headed home. Both kids fell asleep before Zionsville. A very nice day.