Dinosaur bones and organs

Somewhere around on the web, I'd seen some photos from San Diego's Natural History Museum and noticed they've got a permanent exhibit of dinosaurs and dinosaur fossils. Now that Smunch is 5.5, I thought he might really enjoy seeing some life-sized dinosaurs and bones and such. Naturally, I was wrong.

I decided Daddy would be happier going off on his own to re-tour the U.S.S. Midway, an aircraft carrier docked in San Diego harbor. Smunch didn't want to go with him again and I had designs on going to see the dinosaurs. So, AK and I packed up all three kids and headed to Balboa Park, which houses most of San Diego's museums, as far as I can tell.

Getting into the Natural History Museum is a little onerous right now because they also have a very popular exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for which there is a ton of security...and a big extra fee upon admission. We skipped the Dead Sea Scrolls in favor of bones and fossils.



The kids didn't have a bad time, but Smunch wasn't anywhere near as impressed as I'd expected him to be by the big skeltons and models, the sabre toothed cats and giant sloths. It just wasn't that neat, I guess. Or maybe he's just not a dinosaur kind of guy. He did think this giant shark was pretty interesting, but the fascination pretty much stopped there unless there were knobs to be turned or buttons to be pushed.



We went to a little class run by Ms. Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus. That was kind of fun. Just as well Daddy wasn't there since it was a whole class about spiders. The kids, aside from Spencer, were entertained. Spencer was bored and now that he's super mobile, he didn't have any patience for sitting in a lap or a stroller.

We rounded out our afternoon with a visit to Balboa Park's giant pipe organ.

There was an afternoon concert, so we watched the end of that. That was O.K. with the kids too and at least Spencer could crawl around on the hot concrete. Ouch! He didn't really seem to mind.



We headed home. My greatest regret about the day was that Daddy felt like he needed to be back when we were. To play it safe, he actually arrived an entire hour before we got home. (Our homecoming was mis-advertised, as usual.) He'd had a great time seeing the Midway on his own. He seriously needs to get out by himself more!