Plan vs. reality, March 21

Pretty smooth sailing. It actually rained (which I didn't factor in), but lucky us - the rain started only when we got into the car to drive home. Woke up pretty late, 8:45am, but plenty of time to dress and eat breakfast. Drove to CDM, parked really close (since we came early), went in for an hour and a half. They have two new exhibits, "Out on a Limb" (looks pretty but there's little to do) and water play. The kids really enjoyed the last one, of course, getting wet despite the aprons.

Upstairs, it was all old stuff, but they both got a huge kick out of a pyramid mirror, where you could see multiple you. I find the museum a bit boring, and it's really a solitary experience at this point: the kids play by themselves, one each, and we just follow them around, occasionally voicing a concern, a warning, or a suggestion. A good place to kill time, and excellent for rainy weather (albeit crowded), but not at all in the list of my favorites.

Then we walked to the Tech, a nice 15-20 min walk and the weather cooperated, bought the tickets for the Flight of Magic IMAX movie, had lunch in the cafe, and played in the store for a few minutes before the show. I took lunch to go, and it was a huge hit: chicken-celery pirozhki (which I heated at home and wrapped in foil and towel), havarti cheese-cream cheese sandwich, baby carrots, campari tomatoes, apple sauce and water. The movie was pretty good, although I wish they spent more time talking about how people learned how to fly (starting with Daedalus, not just Wright Brothers) instead of spending the largest proportion of the movie talking about Blue Angels who were preparing for the air show. The kids enjoyed it, of course, although A. (2.2-yr-old) enjoyed it only the first 20-30 min and spent the rest of the time trying to talk and walk around. Sigh.

We walked back to CDM, spent an hour at the birthday (it was a short event; they reserved the room for an hour), and drove home to nap. Unfortunately, they don't reliably fall asleep at nap time, so whatever we plan for after the nap, often doesn't happen or morphs into something else. As it was today. They played with each other instead of sleeping, so after an hour we separated them into different rooms, meaning they didn't fall asleep until almost 5pm. So I ended up going to Whole Foods by myself, which in this case turned out to be a boon: I was shopping for obscure things for my granola & kids' breakfast biscuits (wheat germ, flax, brown rice syrup, amaranth, rye grain flakes, etc).

After dinner, they wanted to play with flashlights, so we turned off the lights in the living room, handed each a flashlight, and off they went running after each other like crazing and making a "moon" and "sun" on the ceiling (they made me "fall asleep" when it was the moon, and "wake up" when it was the sun).