May 20, 2007 (11:56 p.m.)
It’s already quite late, but I’ve utterly failed to keep up on what’s happening. So let’s see…Doug left on Sunday morning.
On Wednesday we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and stayed until just about closing time. We went through the space exploration area, where we did fun things like create craters in the sand with heavy metal balls, examine meteorites, look at the light spectrum o
f different elements and do a fuel cell experiment. (Interesting side note: One of the guides there was showing us the different sorts of meteorites that they had. We were told that if you found a meteorite yourself and took it to someplace like the museum, NASA would confiscate it. They apparently consider any and all meteorites to be their property, and if you bring one in, they simply take it out of your possession. So if you suspect that you’ve found one, take it to a rock shop instead. Otherwise you won’t get to keep it.) There
was a kid’s area where they got to dress up in space suits and jet packs, and 
use pincher-claws to pick up fake moon rocks in a staged moon setting. I unbelievably got David (!) and Lauren to dress up in the suits, and they had a lovely time. They also piloted their own pretend space mission, which seemed to rely quite heavily on loading the fake rocks into some sort of launcher and shooting the “bad guys.” If only NASA were like Star Wars, they’d be all set. They wouldn’t allow Grandma to come see their fun, however, so she had to settle for photos. In the meantime, she got to sit at one of their displays and watch a movie on String Theory.
At that point I forced Lauren to use the restroom, which threw her into a complete screaming tizzy. It took a good 20 minutes to calm her down; I would have paid a handsome price for 20cc’s of Thorazine. From there we moved on to the kids discovery area, where they had a fan table (you can experiment with scarves, pinwheels, ribbons, etc. and see which items rise the highest and/or float the longest), an open piano (so you can see the innards) and a tub of bubble solution with a dozen different wands. Lauren played several games testing your sense of touch. After a bit she found a neat dinosaur area where they had two wooden dinosaur skeletons set up and a big sandbox with a fake dino skeleton glued to the bottom. The “fossil” was covered with recycled tire chips and there were several dry paintbrushes around, so you could uncover the bones yourself paleontology-style. She ran back to David and dragged him over with exclamations of, “I find dinosaurs, Bebo! It weely twu!”
In a short time they started some demo thing on the stage called “How Animals Move” and they were inviting the kids to come join them. David was much too shy for that sort of thing, but Lauren didn’t even bother to sit in the audience, she just marched up onto the stage and awaited instruction. She didn’t have to wait long, they hung a sign around her neck which read “PIGEON” and had her flap her wings, bob her head, and walk like (duh) a pigeon. This was her first big acting debut.
After that we found the glassed-in animals. Deer, elk, bears, seals…they even had walruses.
From animal models to animal bones, we moved on to the dinosaur skeletons. We also talked to a docent who handed us a tooth of a T-Rex and a Dilophusaurus, not to mention our foray into fossilized dinosaur crap. Yup, there is such a thing. It goes by the euphemistic term, "coprolite .” Better marketing, I suppose.
Thursday we went to see Shrek the Third at the movie theater in Cherry Creek. Susan sat with us, and Lauren watched the whole thing, beginning to end. David had to get up several times for potty breaks, but at the end he said he deeply enjoyed it and his favorite character was the cat. We went out to Johnny Rockets for dinner, and topped off the evening playing in the Cherry Creek Mall play area, where the kids slid down giant pieces of bacon, hopped on the yolks of big fried eggs, and sat on giant blueberries floating in a bowl of shredded wheat.
Friday we went to Idaho Springs to swim in the hot springs pool. Grandma only had one pink floaty-noodle (I don’t recall what the things are marketed as), which Lauren wanted, so we stopped by K-Mart and bought David a blue noodle for himself. We ate lunch at Quizno’s (after a lot of confusion and wrong orders by the apparently-new chickie behind the counter) and got to the hot springs around noon.
Both kids have had a couple of months of swimming lessons, but still don’t know how to swim. This is because of how the lessons are structured…it’s taken me awhile, but after watching Lauren get incredibly bored in swim class, I started paying way more attention. Each lesson is about 45 minutes long. There are approximately six kids in each class. Every kid gets a turn to practice their swimming with the teacher. So each kid gets about 7.5 minutes of instruction per lesson. This leaves them 37.5 minutes to sit and wait their turn. Oh, gee. No wonder she’s getting bored! And no wonder they can’t swim yet. They’re only getting 15 minutes per week in the water. The rest of the time they have to sit on the wall, waiting for their turn.
The lessons have at least gotten them acclimated to the water with no problem. They loved the warm springs water, and since there wasn’t exactly a shallow end for them…well, they pretty much just learned how to swim over the next seven hours. They can now tuck a noodle under their arms and paddle around on their own, which is a vast improvement.
There were a couple of other little kids at the pool, and David quickly latched onto a six-year-old boy from Greeley named Adrian. They started playing around, and by the end of the whole thing they were holding their noses and going under the water, seeing who could stay under the longest. This kind of behavior from the boy who refused to get his face wet. I took a video of it, because I know Doug would never believe it if I told him. Lauren had a great time, too, and spent a great deal of time looking for, and rescuing, bugs which had fallen into the water. We saw several ladybugs and another type of smaller beetle…and rescued one ant.
We finally left around 7 p.m. and went to Beau Jo’s Pizza for dinner. This particular Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs is in the old Mining Exchange building. They have a replica of a mine entrance in one corner, and of course the building itself is well over 100 years old. I took the kids over to see the wooden ladder going down into the shaft. Neither of them thought it sounded like a good job to go down into dark tunnels in the ground and dig stuff out of rocks. They have plenty of great-grandfather-types who did just that. I told them they had that in their backgrounds, and that it was indeed very hard and dirty work.
Lauren once again had a complete fit over something at the restaurant…I think it was over where she had been sitting, as in, “I wasn’t sitting in this chair, I was over there, and Bebo stole my place!” which was completely ludicrous. She never was in that chair. But she took to screaming at the top of her lungs and then hitting me with her fists to make her point, which earned her an amazingly fast trip up the stairs and into the bathroom. I tolerate a lot, but consequences are swift and terrible when you decide to start screaming and especially when you start hitting.
After a terribly difficult time working on proper ways to channel one’s energy, we came back downstairs just in time for the pizza to arrive. This improved everyone’s mood substantially. I was also surprised that both kids stayed awake on the car ride home; David thought looking at the lights of the city from the mountain was pretty cool. (He also thinks living in the mountains would be pretty cool, too.)
Saturday we went to Heritage Square in Golden with Fabulous Aunt Susan. They have a lot of kiddie rides, and the kids were at the perfect height this year; Lauren was (just) the requisite 36” to ride such things as the roller coaster, and David was (just) the requisite 42” to be able to ride the kiddie rides without an adult. He also got to drive his first go-kart. “And I was the blue one!” he says. He was slightly disappointed that there was no horn, and it said, “No Bumping” on the steering wheel instead. (Yes, he read that himself. Hurray!) The adults were somewhat less thrilled with riding the rides; there’s something about getting older that makes going ‘round and ‘round less amusing and more sickening. Susan looked a little green coming off the Tilt-a-Whirl.
We saved the Alpine Slide for last. We still had four tickets left, but there were some ominous, dark clouds gathering at the top of the mountain, and we’d seen at least one flash of lightening. We decided to try and beat the rain. Grandma opted out of the hike required to get to the chairlift. (Which, I have to admit, is quite a grade to contend with.) Susan got the tickets, and David insisted on carrying the adult ticket instead of the kid ticket, simply because it was blue. I got on the lift with Lauren, and this time we were able to get everyone on without having them stop the whole thing. Lauren thought perhaps we’d have to jump off the lift, but I assured her we wouldn’t need to plummet several feet. “But you’ll need to hurry off fast to the left,” I told her.
“Why?!?”
“So you won’t get hit in the butt or the back of the head!”
There aren’t many chairlifts in Missouri.
We got off and waited for David and Susan, and then picked out our sled. (They’re large, blue skateboards with plastic runners instead of wheels. A lever in the middle allows you to slow down or speed up, and you sit on the thing and sort of toboggan down the concrete run.) Double-riders are automatically relegated to the slow lane, so David and Susan went ahead of us. All the way down the mountain Lauren was shouting, “Faster! Faster!” despite the warning signs to slow down and not tip over the sleds. Happily we didn’t have any rain to deal with, so we felt quite fortunate to have made it.
We went back to the rides area and used the last four tickets on a type of roller coaster that went both forwards and backwards. We got off of that and met up with Grandma, and a bright flash of lightening was quickly followed by a double-crack and rolling boom of thunder. Ah. Time to leave. Now. We had some lesser bouts of lightening and then another big one when we got to the gates of the park. Both kids were very eager to get to the van. Lauren later told us in the car that “Whenna lightening struckeled, everyone leff!”
We had a couple of hours before Mark and Mary Ellen came over for dinner. We were unusually prepared, so weren’t really running around like a couple of nuts. Susan showed up first and then Mark and Mary Ellen arrived. David had been bouncing around the house announcing how bored he was, and right before they arrived, he sat on the couch and fell sound asleep. There was absolutely NO waking him up, so everyone sort of sat around him while serving up chips and dip.
We eventually moved outside, and Mary Ellen started to show Lauren how to arrange sticks to build a campfire. This went over quite well with Lauren, who felt Oh-So-Big to be taught such a thing. Mark started to grill the corn, and eventually David mildly woke up. I explained what was going on and he went outside in time to join in the campfire discussion. I said something about needing a fire pit and asking Grandma if we could build her one, and pretty soon Mary Ellen came in asking for matches. Frighteningly enough, David has NO IDEA what a match is. We never have them around the house, and we tend to rely more on the butane lighters for things like the grill or even for going camping. Naturally Grandma has plenty of matches…when one has a wood burning stove for central heating, this is like having access to water. It’s sort of a given.
They all troop back outside and sure enough, pretty soon I’m called from the kitchen to come and see the fire they’ve built. A small ring of bricks has been placed in the garden (bare dirt at the moment) with a little pyre of twigs in the middle, and they’ve got a little campfire going. Lauren thinks it’s incredibly cool and I know David is about to turn inside-out. He couldn’t be happier. (We saw that someone was trying to sell a tent at a Yard Sale earlier in the week and he went nuts, shouting “Get the tent! Get the tent!” He adores tents, camping, fishing…the instant we hit the campsite the first words out of his mouth are “Let’s go hiking!”)
We get dinner served and eaten. David spills his milk all over the picnic table. Naturally. Thankfully the kids are at their own table. (This is my picnic table from when I was little.) David cleans up with some napkins and then David, Lauren, Mark and Mary Ellen all rebuild the campfire and we all end up roasting tiny marshmallows on twigs. Mary Ellen kept apologizing for corrupting the kids; I told Mom that it was more likely that the kids were going to ask for my resignation and adopt Mark and Mary Ellen for their parents instead!
We head inside and Susan and I clean up some of the stuff. By the time I come back out, David has somehow convinced Mark to get down on the floor with him and go through all of his beloved Star Wars toys that he brought with him. This has to have been sheer bliss as far as David was concerned. He got to go to the amusement park and ride roller coasters, take the Alpine Slide down the mountain, build two campfires outside in the dark and come inside to play Star Wars. Oh, Lord.
Eventually Lauren just crawled up into my lap and shut her eyes. I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep NOW. It was something like 11 p.m., so I carried her to the bedroom, slipped a diaper on her and put her into bed. She didn’t even squeak. Everyone sort of took this as their cue to leave, and David made a big show of changing into his red and yellow monster pajamas and showing off.
So much for Mr. Shy.
