museum playdate

this is the text message I send my out-of-town husband tonight:

"We had a great day. So fun, totally fantastic. And then came dinner with the abrupt decline into screaming spitting fighting tantrums. Including bloodshed."

and so it is.

But it really was a great day. Butterfly had school, I actually made it to my class at the gym on time, got some nice one-on-one with Ladybug and had an awesome playdate planned with grandma. I picked up Butterfly from school and had her eat in the car while we dropped off the carpool and picked up grandma. We planned to go to the zoo but the skies were gray and windy so we opted for the Natural History Museum instead.

What a blast! and, my kids are such geeks already. Auntie met us there and we took our time wandering through the fantastic displays. The museum was recently moved into a brand new location and it's pretty incredible. We started in the Native American area and the girls bounced around curiously. They finally settled down to watch a movie of dancers as they performed at a pow wow (gets me excited to take them to it this summer). Then we moved into Living Thing where they played with a giant jigsaw puzzle of a cell and we played "I Spy" at the environment displays (finding certain animals, birds, plants). We learned about seismometers as we jumped on a certain spot and watched the tracker bounce up and down as it recorded our movement. We played with erosion at the wind and water tables. And then we spotted....

the dinosaurs. After their brief demonstration of rawring and stomping dramatically, the girls raced through more displays until we got to the dinosaur exhibits. They were pretty fascinated and asked lots of questions. They were most shocked by the drawings of dinosaurs eating other dinosaurs ("being naughty...and gross" said Butterfly), had fun putting together a fossil puzzle and tried their hand at drawing on the chalkboards in the excavation room. They didn't actually draw the excavation. Rather, Butterfly wrote her name and a small stick figure dinosaur while Ladybug ran around erasing all of the boards as fast as she could (much to her sisters dismay). We found a hands on room to play in for awhile (puzzles, dino toys, flip books, etc) before reaching what must be the unofficial "kid room". Designed especially for kids (and painted with the best kid targeted scenery ever, awesome use of bright colors and simple lines), the prominent feature was a river, running along at their chest height where they could scoop out different (plastic) bugs and animals with a net and then identify them with magnifying glasses. They played and played until they were completely drenched (I had to take their shirts off and zipped their jackets on instead).

Our last stop was the gift shop, where we perused the fun toys, books, mementos and jewelry until Ladybug pulled a ten pound rock off the cashier's desk and dropped it on her foot. Fortunately, the only casualty was a pen that was smashed into pieces whereas her foot luckily remained intact.

Having had our fill of fun (and getting hungry) we continued our playdate at a nearby cafe. This is where the little angels turned on me. They became stubborn and belligerent, refusing to eat/sit still/speak respectfully/stop arguing. The climax was when Ladybug (who had finally begun to eat because I was coddling her and spoon feeding her) sprayed a mouthful of chewed pasta on me and the baby. I was not pleased. So she sat on time out while we tried to get Butterfly to eat and finally gave up. (But at least my dinner was tasty.:) ) I had hoped to run errands while in "the big city" but with the apparently over tired children in tow, we decided against it and headed for home. All three kids were asleep before we were even halfway there.

We dropped grandma off and pulled into the driveway just as Ladybug fish hooked the baby hard enough to split her lip and make her bleed (hooked a finger into the corner of her mouth and pulled). As I spent the next ten minutes trying to get the baby to stop crying, the other two started fighting again. Frustrated, I put them both in pjs and put them in bed so I could focus on the baby. She settled down quickly and I got her into bed but the other two children had transformed into wailing banshees and refused to stay in their rooms. After the third bedtime jailbreak, Ladybug took advantage of me being distracted and ate a full sized chocolate bar that I had stashed away as a future treat. After two more jailbreaks, I'm hoping she has finally gone to sleep.

Fingers crossed.

***they did stay in bed after that. But then I stayed up to midnight thinking about how I didn't handle the dinnertime tantrums very well and thinking what I should have done differently. Sometimes we need to stop and reset but I forget to do that when I'm in the thick of things and getting so frustrated. I need to work on this. and in general, we need to work on dinnertime. Lunchtime is usually pleasant. Simple, reasonably quick and leads comfortably into naptime. Why is dinnertime so different? I know I tend to be more flustered but it seems that the girls are consistently more cranky, belligerent and fussy at the dinnertime hour. Is it the time of day? the presence of daddy or other company? the larger, usually more complex meal? soon, AngelBaby will be joining us more than her usual sitting in the highchair with toys but will actually get to eat with us. Maybe I can find a way to make this help.