In the beginning

Reuben being the insightfully manipulative individual that he is, begged me each morning to not make him go to school but "let's all go to the dinosaur museum together!"
When he saw me wavering he quickly added, "And the art museum! I want to see all the beautiful paintings with you." Clever.

So when his week of summer school ended we headed back to the museums.
At the natural history museum, I love walking through the dioramas of the ancient earth. Reuben has developed a fondness for the giant eurypterid model and insist we stop by and say hi each visit. He's also become taken with the mass extinction events. One interesting thing I learned, the Permian-Triassic extinction, the largest, may have been caused by an asteroid but since the earth's sea floor is renewed almost every 200 million it's possible that the impact site was long ago subducted. Since the earth's surface is 70% ocean it's more likely an asteroid would hit water than landmass. Although now I'm wondering if the Earth has always maintained the same land to ocean ratio. Anyone know? Asteroid or not, the big die off did leave evidence that one way or another way too much carbon dioxide got into the atmosphere and things unraveled in a very ugly way from there.

Back at the museums, we stumbled upon a free kids program at the National Gallery. A docent reads a fiction book that relates to the art in the gallery, discusses the art, then the kids do a related craft For Free. I'd like to pretend I'm the type of parent that knows about these things and signs up but I'm not. We really just walked in and were kindly invited to stay.