Sunday Outing with Lambda Family Circle
November 16, 2008 by Green Dads
Today we went on a little outing to the New York State Museum with Lambda Family Circle. Lambda Family Circle is our local GLBT parents group and the museum trip today was part of a series of monthly play groups. We only met one other family there, a woman and her son.
We quickly moved through the Adirondacks exhibit because D could see a Mammoth all the way across the length of the museum and we just had to go there. From there we moved to an exhibit on “invasive species”, this was a new exhibit and of particular interest to me. In college I took many ecology, wildlife biology and environmental courses. It was once a dream of mine to work in wildlife biology, but I was sidetracked by the idea of teaching school only to discover after awhile that I did not have the temperament for teaching. From there I somehow ended up working in a clinical laboratory. The exhibit showed a large number of non-native species that have invaded various habitats in New York State, I was not even aware that many of the organisms shown there were not native species. There was a special area where the kids could view small things like seeds and zebra mussels through a digital microscope. This was a big hit with D.
After this area we made it to the New York City exhibit which takes up nearly half of the museum. The picture of D is from the inside of an actual 1950’s era subway car. The straps became an impromptu playground for a few minutes. The museum now contains an extensive exhibit on 9/11, including pictures and video of the World Trade Center towers crumbling down and the planes crashing into the toweres. Of course this became the source of a stream of questions from a certain 5 year old. “Why did the planes crash into the towers?” “How come the towers fell down?” “What happened to the people in the towers?” and “Why would someone crash planes into towers?” All very troubling and difficult questions to answer and they somehow caught me off guard. I’ve had an easier time telling him where babies come from. From here we decided it was time to go home.
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It seems kind of hard to have to answer questions about it from someone who wasn’t even born at the time. I guess we forget that time marches on.
It sounds like you had a decent time before that, though.
GDad’s last blog post..Happy Veterans’ Day