I decided today that despite the fact that all of my friends are spending their summers in Prague and China and even just across our country's coasts and I'm in charming Worthington, Oh...I should blog! Because I'm not "stuck" as I had spent the first part of my summer feeling. I love the little rugrats that I spend my days with even if they do have temper tantrums far below their maturity levels. So here's one of the many funny stories from our summer together.
Yesterday we spent the day at COSI. This is a brave endeavor with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old in tow, but we did it, and it ended up being a really fun trip. We got there at 10 AM on the dot when it opened and weaved our way through the job fair crowd into the Ocean section to jump right into exploring. And we never stopped from there. We went to Progress and got to see an old telephone operator's booth, a horsedrawn carriage, a doctor's office from 1863, a 1960's diner, and a TV station from the Civil Rights era. We played in the Gadgets section and learned about pulleys and gravity and air density. We went to their temporary Egypt exhibit and I explained the afterlife and mummification to the girls. They are inquisitive beyond their years and I get to sharpen my teaching skills and reawaken all those things I learned back in junior high. The challenge is getting electromagnetic fields into early elementary school terms :)
I was really proud of how good the girls were all day, patiently waiting their turn in line to try out the hands-on activities and I was really disappointed in how poorly mannered so many of the other kids there were. Albeit, many of them were there in summer camp groups that didn't have nearly enough supervisors for the number of campers they brought, but Kennedy and Regan (yes, those are their names) really got the shaft on several occasions. Kids would jump in front of them after they had been waiting to try something or they would run up and interrupt the girls' work. I felt like I spent half the day playing blocker to the hoards of rude kids. I wanted to show the girls that waiting and being considerate pays off and I felt badly because I could tell their frustration was mounting. I couldn't believe how many parents allowed their kids to play for 15 minutes or more at an exhibit when other people were obviously waiting.
But all in all it was an entertaining and educational day. We learned that someone Kennedy's size could crawl through the veins of a blue whale, which I thought was pretty cool. And my favorite moment of the day came as I was explaining how prisms fragment light to Regan. We were playing with mirrors and prisms in this tray that sprayed mist so that you could see laser beams and move the mirrors around to change them. Regan and I were busily moving the mirrors all over the tray when I look over and see Kennedy "scooping" up the mist into her arms and rubbing it all over her face. I asked what she was doing and she looked up at me happily and replied "oh this feels wonderful!" Three floors of one-of-a-kind exhibits at the #1 science center in the country and that is what pleased her for the morning. I guess it really is thee little things...
