Children's Museum, Adieu

We've been members at the children's museum for a year now, and we're going to let the membership lapse. But it expires Tuesday so I thought we'd suck the marrow out of it and go today.

And so we did. A got to participate in a class where we made parachutes out of grocery bags. Goes like this: Take a regular plastic grocery store bag. Cut the sides open a bit to make them more airy. Take two small (1/2-3/4-inch) washers and thread the handles of the bags through the washers. Punch two holes in a piece of cardboard and thread the handles through so that washers are flush with the cardboard. Fold the remaining cardboard over the washers and seal with tape.

Wah-lah. Parachute.

Except that they don't work very well without being launched, and so they have four jerryrigged cannons made of rubber bands, clothesline, funnels, and brightly-painted MDF to launch the parachutes into the courtyard below.

Now, the project was great fun, and then there was some marching, and then there was the launching, and A thought launching was fabulous. Except our plastic bag was a pretty green one from a bookseller (he picked it, not me) and as such did not have the appropriate lightness and capacity to make a good parachute. So it torpedoed onto the gallery below us, where people were painting a car and playing with clay.

A thought this was the most fabulous thing ever, because all he saw from his position behind the balcony was the launch. He could not lean over the balcony to see the landing. I could, and I saw people scurrying out of the way and sometimes getting hit in the head.

Well, once you launch, they drop a bucket down to collect the parachutes. And they kept sending A's back, so I kept letting him launch it. If they're stupid enough to send a projectile back up, I'm stupid enough to let him launch it. He launched it five times. He had a blast.

Anyway, it was a good last day. I think we'll join one of the other, more exciting museums (the Fleet, perhaps) that has share days with the children's museum and that'll suffice. But it's just not as super as we anticipated.