August 28, 2006 - Monday
As I did last year on the day before Harry started kindergarten, I took him on a special father-son excusion, this year to the See-Science Museum in Manchester. I'll admit to not really having a definite plan for today until we had dropped Jeremy off at Mary's house and were getting back into the car. Sure, I'd thought about the museum, and a few other options, but I was a bit torn. I have a short business trip to go on tomorrow, so this would have been my day to work this week. And, I'll concede, Harry's been getting on my nerves lately with his silly baby talk, whiny attitude, and under-stimulated brain. I actually came close to asking Mary if Harry could stay with Jeremy, especially when got there and saw Kesley, a 9 (I think) year-old girl that Harry has played with before. But after dancing around it with Mary briefly, the obvious answer was just do something with Harry. I'm the adult in this relationship and therefore it's probably not going to be Harry who's going to change the current dynamic. And, of course, the best and easiest cure for most parenting ills is to just do stuff with the kids, especially one-on-one. So, it was the science center.

We'd been there before, but not very recently and it had gotten much bigger. The great thing about this science museum is that it has a lot of hands-on experiments for kids and parents to do, including geometric puzzles, lights, a robotic arm, and a lot of different stations dealing with sound and sound waves. Even better, there weren't very many people there on this Monday morning so we got to do everything without doing much waiting. Of course, Harry wanted to do this easy things, but today I was committed to pushing his brain a little and getting it back on track. He figured out one of the geometric puzzles by himself, but then quickly gave up on the next one. Admittedly, it was a tough that I eventually had to ask one of the museum workers about, but I still wanted him to try harder. I also spent a lot of time trying to get him to think about the sound experiments, like the one with two giant satellite dish like discs facing each other from far across the room. The idea was for two people to face the discs, back to each other, and talk. Even at a whisper we could hear one another. I told Harry to turn around and face me. He couldn't hear me like that. That's a tough thing for a 6-year-old to figure out, but I press him, calling on some of the other experiments we'd done, and ultimately leading him to the understanding that the disc was echoing many sound waves at once straight at the other disc where I was, compared to just one sound wave when we were facing each other.

Even better were the two demostrations we watched, the first of a GGGG electric generator that made one's hair stand out straight. Harry's never brave about volunteering and this was no different, even though I prodded him when the man asked for someone to help. Thankfully, the crowd was small enough so that every got a turn, including a very leery Harry and only after I did it first. No matter, though, the important thing is that he did it, got an electric shock and simply experienced something unknown. He even did it again when the man did the demostration an hour later.

The best part, however, was the moon gavity demonstration. There a little harness (actually, just a child-sized flotation life vest like Harry wears in the canoe) attached to a huge spring on the ceiling. The idea is that kids can put this on and, more or less, experience what it might be like to jump on the moon with less gravity. I'd remembered this demostration from the last time we were here, although we didn't get to do it last time, and had actually talked with Harry about it in the car, saying something like, you should try new things like that. "You'll need to be a little bit brave because this things will be new for you, but you should be brave and try them."

I'd asked the museum if they'd be doing that demonstation when we were ready to leave and ended up waiting about 20 more minutes. But that meant Harry was first in line once it started. And by the time it did there was a pretty good crowd of kids watching. The man asked Harry if he wanted to watch someone else do it first


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