July 11, 2005 - Monday
These pictures are from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in a very clever interactive display that lets kids use real tools to dig for dinosaur bones. The bones are hard plastic and the "dirt," I'm told, is a simple mixture of sand and wax, which gives it a wonderful balance between needing a serious effort to dig and allowing kids to actually make a little progress. The rest of the museum has classic diorama displays of taxidermy mammals and pre-historic models and those are always fun for kids. We also visited a couple of other temporary exhibits, albeit with mixed results.

First, "The Mysterious Bog People" offers a fascinating look at 2000-year-old artifacts and corpses that have been amazingly well preserved by the swamps in the Netherlands, with a intriguing sub-theme of forensic science. Of course, that sort of stuff is a couple of years too advanced for Harry or Jeremy and neither got anything much out of the exhibit. Worse, there seemed to be a specific effort in the exhibit installation to make the area dark and creepy, with dimmed lights and slightly too loud, piped in eerie noises. Harry did not like it and we needed to move through deliberately. I kept trying to point out interested artifacts like swords, knives, and bowls, but it didn't work all that well.

The other point of particular interest was a Egyptian exhibit. We basically walked straight through that because the boys had no interest in bowls and things that look very similar to things we have today, but there was an installation of a model tomb that you could go inside. It was small, with narrow passages, dim lights, and audio of water dripping and things bumping and Harry didn't like it at all. He went in with the rest of us (he couldn't go out because there wasn't room to pass mommy and grandpa as they were coming in), but he kept saying he wanted to leave.

Maybe it worked out, though, because I got to talk to him about it at bedtime. Since he has his own museum which has doubled since that picture three months ago) and has aspirations of being a curator, and because we saw and talked about covered up and not ready for viewing display areas in Washington as places that were waiting for the Smithsonian's curator to descide what to show next, I was able to turn it around for him.
"Hey, Harry, you were a little bit scared in that pyramid [tomb] exhibit, weren't you?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I think that means the curator did a good job. Do you know why?"
"No."
"Well, curators have to decide not only what things they're going to show, but how they're going to show them and this was an exhibit about what it was like to live more than 2000 years ago. In the pyramid, the curator was trying to help you pretend that you were really there, inside one of the pyramids. And I think if you were really in one it might be a little scary. The curator made you a little scare, so I think it worked pretty well."
"Were you scare?"
"Yes, I was, Harry. At first I was a little scared. It was dark in there and had those noises. But then I thought, no wait. I'm in a museum. Nothing bad can happen to me here. It's just the curator trying to make it seem real. Then I liked it, because I thought the curator was doing a job."
Harry smiled at bit.
"Harry, it's good to be scared sometimes. It's your body's way of protecting you or stopping you from doing things that could hurt you. Like if there were a real dinosaur in your room here, you'd sure want to be scared and it'd be your body's way of telling you to get out of here. Right?"
"Yeah."
"But then if you are scared, the next thing is to use your mind and try to descide if you're scared for the right reason or if your body is jumping to the wrong conclusion. Being scared is a reaction that happens right away. It takes our brains a little longer to figure things out. But, like today, I was scared, then I thought about it and realized it was just the curator trying to make me a little scared so I felt like I was in a different place. Then I thought it was pretty neat."

I don't know how much that helped, but it sure felt like something to build on and something we'll refer back to later. Harry, like a lot of first children, can be a little timid. That's good if it means he won't drive crazy when he's a teenager, but I don't want him to be intimidated by circumstance either.


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