Boys and Dinosaurs

Last weekend Colin and I took a trip into the city to go to the "Dino" museum - better known to adults as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History - while Lea and Gillian went to see The Nutcracker performed by a local youth ballet company. I wasn't really sure how well this trip was going to go, as Colin doesn't seem to have a huge interest in dinosaurs, certainly nothing approaching his overwhelming love of trains. My fear was that the museum wouldn't hold his attention, especially since this museum isn't really as interactive as say the Children's Museum or the Carnegie Science Center. But, he seemed excited as we left the house, so I hoped that everything would go well.

On of the big draws for Colin was the opportunity to ride in the "blue car" (the little Saturn that I drive to and from work everyday). As we don't have two sets of car seats, and moving the ones we have is something of a pain to move, they don't often (ever) get to ride in it (I think that Gillian did once while Colin was in the hospital). So, Colin was pretty excited as we piled into the car to head into the city. He's quite the little chatter box. I don't think that he stopped talking once during the entire ride into the city. He was especially excited when we "sneaked-up" on "his" city as we rounded a curve on Carson St. and the city skyline sprang into view.

Upon arriving at the museum, a security guard informed us that we couldn't carry our backpacks with us through the museum, so, Colin and I had to get some change so that we could put our backpacks into a pay locker in the coat room. After stowing our gear, we set out to find the dinos.

When you first enter the dinosaur exhibit at CMNH, there's a series of displays about the prehistoric world. These displays have large globes with the configurations of the continents in different time periods projected on the insides. At the bases of these globes are informational plaques and touch-screen computers. These, I think, ended up being the highlights of the museum for Colin. The computers weren't limited to the continents either, each of the dinosaurs had a computer that would give extended information about each dinosaur. Here's Colin using one.

For each dinosaur, the computer would present a screen where it showed the dinosaur as if it were alive (that is, covered with skin), it would then fade-in the skeleton as set-up in the museum. Colin loved this. He said that he was "emailing pictures of those dinos."

Colin did like the big long-neck dinosaurs - especially their long tails.

One of the tails went over the pathway that we walked on. Colin thought that this was pretty cool because the tail was "like a bridge". We did eventually move on to the other dinos. I was excited because they have a very nice T-Rex exhibit. Colin posed for a photo with the beast:

We did see some other things beyond the dinos as well. We went through the Polar World exhibit which includes at lot of stuff about the Inuit, including a life-size model igloo. Colin thought that was pretty cool, and we decided that we would try to build one some day. We also went through part of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

I was interested to see what he thought about the art museum part because we have little book about a trip to an art gallery that Colin and Gillian really seem to enjoy: Miffy at the Gallery. Colin did appear to be interested (at least initially) in the gallery. We saw a mobile (I would guess that it was a Calder, but I'll admit that I didn't get the chance to check), and a Monet (Water Lilies, a personal favorite), and a bunch of photos of Pittsburgh. After about 20 minutes, though, he was ready to move on.

Colin was starting to get tired (we did skip his nap), so we took one last swing through the dinos. Colin wanted to take some pictures of the dinos himself, so I helped and we took this one:

We also snapped a self portrait:

What a cheezer. Anyway, we had a great day.