SPRING BREAK!

I come from a family of people who work in the general teaching/education field. My mom was a teacher, my dad was an assistant principal, and my stepmom was a guidance counselor. They worked in different school districts than the district where my brothers and I went to school, so sometimes we had the same spring break and sometimes we didn't. But even when they had different breaks than we did and we mostly had to spend our spring break at daycare or visiting grandparents, I remember my parents always trying to do something special with us on our spring breaks. I remember when my dad took a day off to take us to Disneyland during one day of spring break, and since apparently nobody else had that same break, the park was nearly empty and we got to go on Big Thunder Mountain three times in a row without waiting in line. I also remember another spring break when my mom left her work right after school so she could pick us up early from daycare and take us to the movies to see Beetlejuice. (I seem to recall the usual restrictions on movie snacks being severely bent that day, too.)

I hope to make Nathan's school breaks fun and memorable, too. This is his first spring break, and even though he kind of doesn't understand the concept of spring break yet, and may not have any lasting memories from when he was four, I wanted to make this week fun. The weather is just getting really, really old, and we need some fun around here!

As I've mentioned before, I used to be the champion of fun day trips. I knew all the fun places to go, and we would usually be at a park, museum, or the like at least twice a week. But ever since Nathan started going to preschool and various other extracurricular activities, we don't have time to go on fun outings very often.

This week, though, everything was canceled, and it was like the old days of long, sprawling days that just beg for a field trip.

Monday we had to catch up on chores and errands after our weekend trip. So the fun didn't start until Tuesday, when we went to Bellaboo's Play and Discovery Center in Northwest Indiana, which is the facility where we held Nathan's birthday party. Tuesdays are free admission days for adults who bring in two cans of food (promo good until April 26), and normally I can't take Nathan on Tuesdays because of his school.

I didn't take any pictures at Bellaboo's because I feel like I have a million pictures from there, and after awhile I just get kind of sick of the same pictures over and over again.

For today, I gave Nathan a choice of either of the two places we have memberships to: Brookfield Zoo and The Museum of Science and Industry. Citing weather-related concerns about the zoo, Nathan picked the MSI. Which I had no problem with, because as I mentioned here and here, the MSI is my favorite museum in Chicago!

The biggest exhibit at the MSI is a German U-Boat submarine that some American sailors captured during WWII. At the exhibit I was trying to tell Nathan a four-year-old-appropriate version of the story behind the capture. The conversation went something like:

Me: So there was this really bad man named Hitler.
Nathan: Why was he bad?
Me: I don't know, some people are just bad.
Nathan: Because he was frustrated and didn't know how to control his feelings when he got mad?
Me: Yes, exactly. So anyway, Hitler told his army to shoot from their submarines at all the boats in the ocean. [Note: I assume it was the German navy and not the army, but Nathan only knows army.]
Nathan: Well, then I think Santa put Hitler and his army on the naughty list.
Me: Yes, I'm sure Hitler and his army were on the naughty list.

Which leads me to think, if it takes Hitler- and Nazi-like behavior to get on Santa's naughty list, that's setting the bar pretty low. In fact, I don't think anybody is lower than Hitler.

(I did point out that after the bad man died and the war was over, the Americans made friends with the Germans again.)

In the hallway between the submarine and the rest of the museum, they have this really cool screen where your shadow can catch falling sand:


We saw the farm exhibit, and you guys, not only did my kid wait patiently in line to sit on the combine, but he got out willingly when I said his turn was up. Finally, a breakthrough.

At the model train exhibit, I only took one picture. These miniature people are part of a model of the Indiana Dunes, which is the beach we go to in the summer.

I'm so jealous of these miniature plastic beachgoers. I can't wait for summer!

Next to the train exhibit was the gift shop at the end of Body Worlds, the temporary exhibit of plasticized dead bodies. We didn't go to the exhibit itself because it's not recommended for children under 13, but Nathan enjoyed the gift shop because (1) he enjoys all gift shops, and (2) he has been interested in human anatomy lately. (If I were my grandma I would say He's going to be a doctor someday!) Look, he took this picture of the stuffed stomach in the gift shop:

He's nestled among the stuffed lungs and brains.

Sometime later I wanted to go look at the baby chicks. Here is how Nathan reacted to the idea of visiting the baby chicks:


But then he got into the chicks and took approximately 17 photos of them. Here is one of those photos:

The kids peering in the other side look cool. That Nathan is going to be a famous photographer someday.

We finished the day at the kids' area. Nathan took this picture of me while standing in line:

I need to stop standing in a way that makes me look like I'm pregnant.

The kids' area is so super cool. There are all kinds of little mechanisms that interconnect, like a flowing river that carries plastic balls, and then kids put the balls in a vacuum tube that carries them over to another bunch of mechanisms. These two shots show Nathan pulling really hard on a rope that controls a ramp that the balls can roll down:




And here he is putting a ball in the vacuum tube:

Finally, I'd like to end with a photo I took of a sign in a hallway on the way back to our car. It seems some frustrated editorial-type museum-goer discovered that there was a space missing in one of the signs, and took it upon him/herself to bust out a Sharpie and mark up the necessary corrections. While I'm opposed to defacement of public property, it's nice to know there are people like me out there. (Though the proper editorial mark to indicate the insertion of a space is #.)