Friday Morning Field Trip!

I had been waiting to take Jonah to see "One World, One Sky: Big Bird's Adventure"for a while now.  It shows at the Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum on the Mall.  It is a 20 minute movie - planetarium style - and all the reviews have been great.  I was waiting for Jonah to seem like he would actually be able to sit in a seat for 20 minutes.  He has definitely reached that point.  Recently, we have started "family movie nights" on select Saturday nights  And as a result of our recent move, he has had lots of "practice" sitting and watching TV... something I am working on vigorously rectifying.  I figured the Big Bird movie advertised some great pictures of the earth from outer space, so this would be a fun "Earth Dayesque" field trip.  So off we went.

Of course, I was completely anxious because I had not bought the tickets online a head of time.  The tickets are actually free, but you can reserve them online for a small charge.  I never got around to doing so.  I was also stressed because we are not a fast "get up and get out of the house" crew... and 10:30am is an early start time for us, especially since we now moved uptown.  But low and behold, we got there by 10:15am, got a parking spot right in front of the museum and were online to enter the planetarium at 10:25am.  Kids were super excited to see Big Bird.  But then, we had to wait for another almost 15 minutes on line.  Oiy.  Vera kinda lost it - she was done sitting in the stroller.  But we waited it out and got our seats.  It was not crowded but there were 3 kindergarten classes there.  (Jonah kept telling me that there were a lot of kids)

The movie was cute and Jonah and Vera really enjoyed it.  They were totally impressed in that "bright eyed - bushy tailed" way with the 360 degrees movie screen on the ceiling. Vera kept looking all around the room and smiling from ear to ear.  Jonah was thrilled to see Elmo helping Big Bird out but a little upset that Cookie Monster did not make an appearance. Apparently, the ice cream sundae snack after the show made up for that.  There were some cool pictures of the Earth from space that Jonah recognized and even explained to me, "mom there's Earth... it is supposed to be spinning...."  (I had showed him spinning pictures of the Earth from the NASA website before we made our "food coloring on coffee filter Earths." 

After the show, we walked through the "How we fly?" exhibit and then stopped for ice cream at the food court.  We brought our snacks outside the museum-it was gorgeous out.  By the time we got home, Jonah & Vera were fast asleep in the car. 

I think my biggest accomplishment of the day is that I was able to move both kids from the car into their beds without waking them up.  Jonah who supposedly gave up his nap at age 2, was fast asleep from 1:00 to 3:30.   (Vera did a 1-3 nap)  This meant I got to have a small nap too!  Whoop whoop for me!

Tonight, we had a nice Shabbot dinner with Auntie Chris to end our week. 

We still need to finish our recycled "Earths" -- aaaah tomorrow is another day!

We made it!

Very excited to see Big Bird!

The star!

time for snacks!

mmmm, oranges!

mmmmm, ice cream!