Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Spring Break, part 1.5 & 2

Sorry for the discontinuity, but I had to add this picture that I meant to include in the last blog entry...it's from last weekend, at the end of a Muz-made blueberry preserve feeding frenzy...


Now, on with the regularly scheduled blog entry...




This morning, Ben and I went to the Children's Museum of Manhattan (CMOM) and had a fun time...the current main exhibition is: "Gods, Myths & Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece".

The exhibit was great, and like the rest of the museum, is designed for kids Ben's age, and is chock full of interactive and hands-on activities for little people...


The picture above shows an Odyssey-related game that had Ben steer an ancient Greek vessel by moving from side to side...the computer tracked his movements and would alter the heading of the ship and the background of the screen as we avoided (or sometimes crashed into) rocks, monsters, and angry gods...


They also had a great climb-in-able Trojan Horse...


Can you spot Odysseus in the picture above?


They had a cool display on Aristotle, and his theories on logic...and Ben had fun trying to fool this bust of Aristotle in an animal identification game based on the characteristics of a few dozen animals and some basic questions used to organize/classify them...


Upstairs in the building, they had lots of edu-taining activities and displays, including this one on firemen and fire-safety...


Ben picked what must have been the smallest fire-jacket in the bunch, and stuck with it...he loved this spelling game that involved a combination of putting out fires with laser-guided water cannons and spelling various three-letter words...


He also really liked playing this game about germs and getting sick...he found it more fun and easier to play the part of a virus than to be the immune system...here he can be seen infiltrating the nose of a potential sickee, and avoiding both the snot and nosehair with a grace and skill that would make most virii jealous...


We ended our visit with a brief stint of Ben as postal carrier, a job that he loved, but ultimately found unfulfilling...he liked bringing packages to kids and shunting them down the slides in the post-office (packages, not kids)...

All in all it was a fun museum, and we may go back again...there were lots of nice kids, many moms and nannies, and 2 dads (including me)...it seemed like a neighborhood destination and playdate spot, as some kids seemed to come there quite often to hang out with friends and the nice staff members...

After leaving the museum, Ben and I walked over to Zabar's, a museum (or shrine) of food and food preparation...we wandered the aisles for a delightful 15 minutes, looking at and smelling the wonderful food before picking out some great stuff for our lunch...4 kinds of olives, cheese, smoked salmon (and some bagels from H&H, the best bagel place in the known universe), sweet sausage, a couple of salads, dried fruit, etc...I was going to take a picture, but as soon as I had it laid out at Muz and D's house, Ben fell on it like a lumberjack at the noonday whistle...he may have eaten some of the enamel off of the plate...he tried everything, and like almost all of it (he's not a big fan of olives)...I also got some coffee (blue mountain style) for when we head home...

A nice morning and lunch...Ben's education continues...

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