Friday, February 26, 2016

Goose and Bug Adventures- Evansville Museum

Last fall there was one cold, rainy weekend where we just could not spend one more second in the house so we decided to take a spur of the moment trip to Evansville, Indiana with our Nana and explore the museum. I took them there five or so years ago and we had a good time but it's a relatively small museum and I knew they'd get bored if we went back year after year.

There was recently an overhaul of the museum and a lot has changed from what I remember so it was a great time to revisit and see what all was new.  Unfortunately it was dark inside most of the exhibits so I couldn't get a lot of photos but take my word for it that it's a good place to visit if you have two or three hours to kill in Evansville.

The quilt exhibit was the girls favorite part.  They enjoyed seeing all of the designs and being the first to point out the most elaborate ones.



I'm a lover of older art (contemporary art bores me a little, I'm sorry) so seeing this Rembrandt made my day.



Included in the admission price to the museum is free entrance into the Evansville Museum Transportation Center next door.  EMTRAC wasn't something we would have necessarily set out to visit but since it was free we gave it a shot and it was well worth it.  The history of the museum on the walls inside was neat but it was hard to enjoy it with two girls watching five seconds of the videos before tugging on your sleeve and pulling you onto the next picture.

There was a small section of a boat built inside where kids could pretend to steer with a giant wooden wheel and they fought over who got to turn it and spout out pretend instructions.

Inside the museum is a sprawling miniature train exhibit that lights up and narrates a history lesson for you as the tiny trains zoom through old-school Evansville.  We watched it twice because they couldn't get enough of it.


The biggest draw for EMTRAC was the real vintage train outside that you can go inside of and explore all of the cars.

They had a blast running through the cars and exclaiming over all of the rooms they found.  Their favorite was a tiny bedroom where the train conductor would sleep that was equipped with a lifelike statue that made both of them shriek in fright.
There's also a train bell that you can pull and it took about five minutes to drag my girls away from it. 
The Evansville museum was a place my mom took me to several times growing up and I remember being so absorbed by it so I'm glad I got to share this with my girls.

Monday, February 22, 2016

My January Book Pile

I started the year out with a bang when it came to books.  I met almost all of my book goals (minus the nonfiction part but the year is still young) this month.  My personal library got a tiny bit smaller, I read a classic, I managed two readalouds with Bug, there's a Newbery in there, and I got another Game of Thrones book out of the way.  One more to go!


The best for this month was by far 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  I powered through this behemoth in barely a week because I couldn't put it down.  Don't get me wrong, it could have been about 200 pages shorter and still as good but you have to go into Stephen King knowing he's going to be wordy.  Sometimes I think he has a bit of Dickens in him where he thinks he's getting paid by the word.

The worst was Watership Down by Richard Adams.  This book took me ages to get through because it was just so boring to me.  It was hard to keep track of all the different bunnies and by the end of it I was just wanting them all to be mowed down.  Horrible, I know, but their personalities were so hard to stomach.

But and I started reading the Chronicles of Narnia and she really liked the first one in the series, The Magician's Nephew.  We started The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but she isn't enjoying it as much and it's been slow going with that one.  I'm hoping that maybe watching the movie will kick-start her into liking them better.

Feverborn is a book that I was looking forward to all year because the Fever series is my number one favorite series ever but this one was just not as good as I had hoped it would be.  This series is going downhill fast and I hate that.  I'm still going to preorder them and I'm still going to devour them ASAP but I really don't have high hopes for the next one.

I don't plan on reading new as much in February but this was a good start to what is hopefully a productive book year.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Happy Birthday Bug!

It was recently Bug's birthday and every year they get to pick what kind of homemade cake they want.  This year she picked Boba Fett which came as no surprise to anyone who has ever met her.  Superman may be her soulmate but she's been having a love affair with Boba since around Halloween.

I worked for about two hours on this and it was nowhere near perfect but she absolutely loved it and said it was her favorite cake ever.


I love her sweetness, her smile, the gap in her teeth, her crazy hair, the way her eyes are swollen in the mornings, the love notes she leaves me all over the house, how she thinks her older sister walks on water, that she's always up for an adventure, her devotion to her raggedy stuffed cat she's had since she was a toddler, I love everything about her.  My heart is full.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Clumsy = Me

I'm not really a regular poster.  I tend to have several ideas for posts all at once and then I won't touch this blog again for weeks.  The only reason the last few book posts came out was because I already had them pre-typed and ready to go.
But this time I had a good excuse for not posting.  Five stitches in the pad of my dominant pointer finger meant my typing days were over for a while.
Note to self:  Electric can openers make very sharp lids.



I've had my stitches out for two weeks now and it's still difficult to touch my finger to things but it's so much easier than it was with my finger sliced so deep that the doctor said I was close to loosing all that meat back there.  Gah!