Flipadelphia!

We took a weekend family trip to Blue Bell, Pennsylvania at the beginning of the month for a wedding and stopped off in Philly on the way home. I hadn't taken the time to plan the trip terribly well so we just parked in Old City and walked around fairly aimlessly until my friend Adam showed up and led us to a yummy Indian lunch buffet. Prior to that Eric had picked up tickets to tour Independence Hall (the building behind Hannah in the picture below). I learned a few things, like that back in the day, the person on trial actually had to stand and that's why we say "standing trial." The The highlight of that tour happened at the very beginning when our tour group was seated around a painting of the Constitutional Convention. The park ranger had just finished talking to us about the convention and the room where it took place (which she led us to next) and asked the group if we had any questions. Hannah, standing on her chair in the back row, raised her hand, and when the ranger acknowledged her, she said, "Um, what's that frame made of? Wood?" The ranger smiled and said she thought so, and Hannah replied that it looked like gold too. I love her.

Edited May 11:
I was shuffling through pictures on my phone and found two more pics from Philly.

Here's one of Hannah and Grammy in front of the Irish memorial.

And here's one of super dad carrying both his kids on his back.

Hannah's Bad: hamming it up at the spring dance recital

Hannah's spring dance recital was the same day as HonFest so after a little rest, I slicked her hair into a bun, packed her costume, shoes, and snack into her backpack, and let Grammy walk her to the church around the corner where her school holds their performances. Eric followed shortly after, and Amy and I were right behind him after a trip to the grocery store to grab some last minute flowers.

The theme was light and dark so each class did two dances, one to something very saccharine and one to something with a little more edge (in some cases, a little too much edge...). Hannah's class danced ballet to Twinkle, Twinkle wearing the tutu she's pictured in below, and then in the second act they traded their tutus for jazz pants and their ballet slippers for tap shoes and danced to Michael Jackson's Bad. It. Was. Awesome. Hands down one of the most entertaining performances I have ever seen, and yeah, yeah, I know, I'm partial, but seriously, it was so cute. I can't wait for the video so I can try to clip out her scene and upload it everywhere.

The best part was at the very end when each class comes out one at a time to take a bow. Hannah aced this part. She bowed by tucking her chin to her chest and rolling her spine down a little rather than by folding at the hips, and she did it over and over and over again. She kept bowing and smiling this huge smile long after the rest of her class had stopped, and she kept it up even as the next class was filing out in front of her class. Then she poked her head between the shoulders of the girls who ended up in front of her and continued to bow! We were cracking up laughing. How did she get to be such a ham??

There's no flash allowed during the performance and although the stage is very well lit, all the pictures that Eric took during the performance are blurry. We hung around after the show and managed to talk Hannah into putting on her tutu again and posing on the stage for a few shots. She wasn't thrilled about it as you can tell from the forced smile, but she humored us.

Since Eric was manning the camera, I took advantage of the opportunity to be in a picture--the first picture of me and both kids! 

Eric declined his chance to be in a pic, so did my mom, and Amy tried to as well, but I managed to talk her into it.

We're taking the summer off but my guess is that she'll want to start dancing again in the fall, and I'm in favor of it because in addition to the obvious reason of wanting her to be happy and do the things she enjoys, I think that getting comfortable in front of a crowd at such a young age is a great experience and a huge confidence booster. Anyway we just inherited some leotards and tights so that'll cut down on our initial costs! All we'll have to do is stalk the consignment shops for new tap shoes and ballet slippers.....

Gentle giant has his 2-month weigh in

Jacob had his 2-month checkup on Monday and weighed in just half an ounce shy of 15 pounds (Hannah was 2 ounces shy of 12 pounds at her 2-month checkup; she didn't hit 15 pounds until she was 7 months old). He is in the 95th percentile for weight and is putting some serious strain on his mama's arms and back as a result. The other numbers don't mean as much to me, but if you're into them, he is 24 3/4 inches long and his head is 44.5 centimeters (Hannah was just an inch shorter at her 2-month checkup, but her head was MUCH smaller at 39.7 centimeters; like her weight, her head wasn't 44 centimeters until she was 7 months). He's in the 99th percentile for both length and height. Numbers tend to just float around my head in an attempt to lodge themselves someplace where they will be understood, but sadly, that place does not exist. More important to me is his growing social awareness and the fact that I have been able to get little laughs out of him in the last few days. Just teeny ones, a little "heh" here and there, but they're so awesome that I spend the following 15 minutes trying to get him to do it again. He smiles huge, flashing that one little dimple he has on his left cheek, and he coos and talks, but at this point, the laughs are still rare and therefore highly coveted.

I'm wishing I would have saved those head shots I took of him on Sunday for this post, but since I didn't, I'm re-posting one of them with a twist: it's baby face comparison time again! I don't have 2-month baby pics of either me or Eric, but here's a pic of Hannah at about 2 1/2 months to compare to Jacob at exactly 2 months:

Smiley little babies with their tongues out!




Back to real time, here they are last week posing in the shirts that Hannah made with Grammy on the morning that Jacob was born. It was pretty tight on him when I put it on that morning so I made sure to get a picture, and when we stripped him for bath, that one got set aside. I want to keep it but need to figure out how...I don't have a keepsake box and don't want to start another. Maybe a quilt?

Erasable family photos

Hannah figured out how to draw stick people sometime in the last month or two, and since then, one of her new favorite this drawing family photos. This morning while I made oatmeal, she drew the picture below. She's the blue one in the middle, Amy is the pink one on the right, I'm the green one on the left, and daddy is the blue one floating above the others. Since she ran out of space before drawing daddy, she decided we would have to carry him.

She drew the picture below last night. She's the yellow one in the middle, I'm the purple one on the right, and daddy is the blue one on the left. We are at a fancy party. Those are balloons at the top, and that's a cake sitting between mine and Hannah's feet. 

I love these pics.

The transformation of Hannah's art gallery

Hannah's art gallery received mixed reviews while it was up. Some raised their eyebrows, plastered on a smile, and said "Oh wow...how nice" in a tone that indicated the opposite. Some suggested nicer ways of displaying her art, you know, frames and such. Then there were those who, like me, loved the kitschy chaos of it all.

I'm not much of a decorator. I don't feel like spending the time or money required to print photos, buy art, buy frames, coordinate frames, hang stuff...I paint the walls, hang whatever framed stuff I've inherited over the years, and leave the rest of the space blank. It's not that I don't want there to be something there, it's just that I don't have it in me to prioritize it.

When Hannah started school in the fall, she also started coming home with a new painting every day. I followed the Montessori way and made comments like, "tell me about this" and "I see a lot of dark lines in this corner" and "is that an 'H'?" instead of slathering on the praise with a simple, generic "good job!" I wanted to show that I was proud though, that I admire her work and creativity, and also that art is a broad category inclusive of many different styles and artists and she should feel free to consider herself an artist if she so desired, so we started taping her work to the wall. She loved it, and so did I because that long, bleak blank space in the dining room was finally filling with color, and the only effort required of me was a little tape ripping.

As the wall filled up, it became clear that Eric had joined ranks with the first group mentioned above. To some extent, I knew it was getting a little out of hand, especially since a lot of the earlier stuff was ripped and barely hanging on to the wall, but there was still blank space that needed to be filled! Sure, I'll admit it, my slight OCD had started to take over, and I wanted to see just how far we could take it. I had never intended to leave it up forever, and in spite of my last post in which I admitted to being an obsessed parent, the gallery wasn't some sort of shrine in her honor or anything. I never had any intentions of keeping all the paintings (the vast majority went out the with the recycling this morning); I really just thought it was fun. 

When the only space left on the wall required a ladder to reach, and the piles of new paintings started stacking up on the floor, I took the above pics and agreed it was time for a new decorating scheme. We went to Ikea and picked up five $5 frames. I picked my favorite five paintings, trying to choose one that represented each color phase and also each style phase (she started with blobs of color, then progressed to lines, the letters, then random swirls and lines and blobs combined). I kept a few more favorites too, and I also kept some of the smaller craft projects she did which I don't have frames for yet.

My goal was to create a framed collage on the wall like this or this or any of the ones at this site so that we retained that element of kitschy chaos that I like so much but in a more acceptable manner, but I don't have any idea how to do that. I mean, do you take a methodical approach and measure your wall and then your art and graph it all out using various standard frame sizes and then take that plan to the store to purchase frames? Or do you just buy a random assortment of frames that look good together in various sizes and bring them home and hope you have stuff to fill them? And once you have the frames, how do you decide how to arrange them on the wall? Do you measure then and graph out a game plan or do you just start hammering in nails and hope it looks awesome in the end?

I haven't given up, but I did decide to start small in a manageable way. These frames weigh next to nothing so we used tiny nails and can totally move them around later when we have more frames and a game plan for making the collage thing happen. In the meantime, we went just lined them up horizontally.

So, artsty fartsy friends, who wants to help me create a Hannah art collage on the dining room wall??? Anybody??

Body art: The prenatal bucket list

With the help of my very awesome therapist, I managed to focus my priorities where I wanted to during the tail end of this pregnancy rather than putting my energy on the things that matter far less in the grand scheme of life and then feeling sad/angry/guilty for not treating this pregnancy like the last pregnancy that it is.

Since this is my last opportunity to experience pregnancy and birth the way that I want, I'm having a home birth, even though it's costing us A LOT more money and I have to drive A LOT farther to my appointments. To compliment that home birth and also to increase the odds of a calm and peaceful birth, one that Hannah can be present for if she chooses to, I read through the Hypnobirthing book for the second time (the first was when Hannah was in utero) and then signed us up for classes. I watched some Hypnobirthing and Hypnobabies videos on YouTube and LOVE how uneventful and boring they are. I am not going for an Oscar on this--bring on the boring!

I intended to focus more on Hypnobirthing with Hannah's birth, but my midwife at the time said that first time moms have a harder time with it and suggested I use The Bradley Method instead. We learned a lot in Bradley classes, but now that I've learned more about Hypnobirthing, I wish I'd stuck with it the first time around. The philosophy is a lot more empowering, and the concept of teaching yourself to go into a deep state of relaxation at the drop of a hat and let your body do its thing seems more useful in this circumstance than an understanding of all the potential drugs and interventions that hospitals use (although a brief understanding of that stuff is useful as well).

Classes accomplished and practice routine set up, I moved on to my next bucket list item: turning my big ol' pregnant body into a work of art by getting a prenatal henna tattoo and some artsy-fartsy, black-and-white, tastefully nude photographs. See, in spite of being incredibly uncomfortable with this extra 35 pounds pulling at me from the front, I am totally amazed by my body right now. It's unreal and amazing to me that it can look like this, and I wanted to capture it so that I never forget. I wanted to be art, if that makes sense.

I really wanted a prenatal henna tattoo when pregnant with Hannah, but I didn't prioritize it, and the one time I was at a festival where I could have gotten one spontaneously, I was wearing a dress...this made access to my belly a little difficult. I did my research and then a photographer fell into my lap  while putzing around Soft and Cozy Baby picking up some prefolds. Jill Mills of Heartlove Photography works there on Sundays and is always incredibly helpful when I have questions, and she's incredibly sweet so when she mentioned that the prints on the wall are hers, I got her business card and we started emailing.  She recommended a henna artist, and I managed to line up appointments for henna, haircuts, and photographs in a 2-day time period last week.

On Thursday, Hannah and I drove to Christalene's house of Crystalooneys Creative Arts and spent the afternoon being decorated by Christalene and hanging out. Hannah's first henna! And mine too! It was a really fun afternoon. These are the pics that Christalene took with her phone after applying the paste.

On Friday afternoon, Hannah and I got our first haircuts since September and then drove to Jill's studio. I haven't seen all of the pics yet, but here's a preview of what she provided:

Pretty cool, right!! She sent me two others that I really love, but they are a bit more revealing, and I know a lot of family members read this blog so I figure I'll share those on an individual basis with people who are not weirded out by nudity/my nudity. I'm thinking I'm going to have them all printed in a book, like a coffee table art book. See, if they were pics of someone else, I'd want to decorate with them, but since they're me, it seems a little conceited...and also, it would really freak out my brother, so for his sake, I'll keep the nipple shots in a book.

Jill also took some straight-forward belly shots for Christalene to use in her portfolio and to print in a magazine that she has advertising space in. Here's what the henna looks like now that the paste is off:  

    

And there it is--I checked off everything from my to do list, I tackled my bucket list, and I blogged about both! Bring on the baby!!

Hannah's furry art fan

The furry feline of the house is a big fan of Hannah's art, especially when it's piled up on the floor waiting to be taped to the overflowing "gallery" wall.

Hannah celebrates MLK Day at The Walter's Art Museum

Hannah and I had big plans yesterday to meet Terrill at The Walters Art Museum to partake in their Martin Luther King Day celebration and all the family friendly art activities that it included. Unfortunately, a family emergency compelled me to drive back to Hagerstown that morning and it was not a Hannah-friendly emergency. Since MLK day is a Government holiday, Eric was home from work, but him and Joel were heading to Home Depot to buy supplies for the book shelves they're building me in the dining room. They agreed to let Hannah tag along, but she was less than thrilled with this option and (very loudly) asserted that she wanted to go to the museum. I don't blame her. Lumber or paintings?? Hmmm...no brainer.

So I called Terrill to cancel/gage her interest in taking Hannah without me. Fortunately for us, she was more than happy to get a little QT with The Banana and quickly agreed to come get her. I hit the road then, upset, but relieved to know that Hannah was in for a fun morning. Check out Terrill's Hannah-centric pictures and stories from their artsy-fartsy fun day on her blog.

I am bummed to have missed out on the fun, but I'm super grateful to have amazing friends like Terrill in my life and love that we are providing Hannah with an awesome community because that's the number one thing I lacked growing up and the one thing I always wanted to provide for my children, long before I even had children.  When the weather gets down to 20 degrees like it is this week, I get so tempted to head south and wonder what on earth I am still doing in such a cold climate zone, and then I remember that this is where my community is, and friends like Terrill make this frigid weather a little more bearable.

Foxy Fox: Crafty Aunt Laura's present to Hannah

Check out the super cute fox pillow that Aunt Laura made for Hannah for Christmas! Hannah opened it when it arrived a few days before Christmas and spent a good 20 minutes squeezing it in a full body hug repeatedly exclaiming about its super cuteness. I have a record of my two favorite lines since I was texting them to Laura while it was happening:

1. In response to me telling her that it's time for a bath: "This fox is so cute I cannot stop hugging it and that's why I can't take a bath."

2. And my personal favorite: "I'm about to cry because it's so cute. Sometimes when you cry it's because something is so cute."

I took some video of her loving up on her fox, but since the video is longer than 6 seconds, I have no easy way of getting it off my phone, and anyway, she is not wearing pants and ends up flashing the camera in the last scene, sooooo....that's not really for public viewing unless I can figure out how to crop the end.

She has been sleeping with the fox since then, and every night she asks "why" questions: "Why does it have buttons for eyes?" "Why does it have this white on its ears?" "What is this nose?" "Why does it have these circles?" She's not critical; just very curious.

My reply is that that that's the way Aunt Laura designed it according to her own artistic vision. We've been talking a lot lately about how everything in life had to be designed by someone....Artists are everywhere!

Hannah's first dance recital

I didn't bother bringing my camera to Hannah's dance recital last weekend because of the no-flash rule. I figured that in a dark setting like that, no flash would yield blurry, un-postable pics. It wasn't as dark as I'd anticipated though, and fortunately, Sondra brought her iPad, which, even without a flash, managed to take some halfway decent shots. I'm not a big fan of Apple ever since owning one of their laptops in the years after college and fighting with it the entire time, but one thing I covet about those products is their cameras....

The Holiday Diversion program included dances to The Nutcracker, Christmas songs like Rudolph and Frosty, and some other random songs with ballet, tap, and modern dance routines. Hannah's class played the part of the mice in The Nutcracker and had a tap dance-off with another class who played soldiers. The kids were beyond adorable. Most of them had no clue what they were doing, and it was the cutest thing ever. Hannah came out and spent more time trying to pick us out of the audience than dancing. I felt bad because in spite of the fact that we were front and center, she didn't see us until she came out at the end for her bow. I spent the rest of the performance wrought with anxiety over the possibility of her thinking that we weren't there watching.

As far as I could tell, she didn't have any stage fright. Below is a pic of when they first came out and found their tape. They stared at each other for a while until their teacher stood up and helped guide them through their tap moves.

Hannah is front and center in this one so you should be able to pick her out. I think they were supposed to scurry through the soldiers...

She was in a better position for photographing when she came out for her bow. Look how cute they are in their little mouse costumes! Their teacher is a one-woman show. She makes all the costumes, runs the studio, teaches all the classes, choreographs all the dance moves, organizes the whole performance, etc.....

This next pic was taken shortly after she spotted us in the audience. She's mouthing the words "mom," "dad," and "grammy" and waving. (She hadn't yet discovered my dad and Sondra sitting on the other side of me.)

Shannon made this perfect little bouquet for me to give to Hannah after the show. She added blue thistle both for texture and because it's Hannah's favorite color.

After the performance the whole audience hovered around waiting for the dancers to get out of their costumes and come out. I'm not thrilled with how that whole scene went down. Fortunately my mom was standing up near the backstage door and caught Hannah as she came out. I was standing back a bit, trying not to crowd the door. I figured I'd see her backstage mom and would beeline to the front then, but her and a few other girls came out without their backstage mom, and they're so short that they just stood there all bewildered by the crowd of strange faces. I felt guilty about not being closer for days and vow to handle that differently should there be a next time. In the meantime, grammy saved the day and scooped her up.

I gave her a big hug and her bouquet, and Sondra snapped some more pictures.

Then we walked back to the house (the recital was right around the corner), and Hannah hung out with pappy and grandma Sondra for a few minutes while I whipped up some dinner and then hurried her off to bed.

We ordered a DVD so if anyone is interested in seeing her brief little mouse dance, stop by in about 6 weeks.

Bunnies for your tree!

Hannah picked out a cookie cutter for this year's holiday ornament when we visited Amish country this summer. She opted for a bunny. So far, her choice cookie cutters have been very Easter-ish (last year was a duck).

On the first weekend in December, while I was making pancakes, Hannah and Eric mixed up some salt dough using this recipe. Those two were pretty eager to set up the Christmas tree so after stamping out a few bunnies, I took over the assembly line and filled two cookie sheets with bunnies.

We baked them at our oven's lowest temperature for a LONG time which kept them from bubbling up like last year's ornaments (awesome tip from the mama at The Imagination Tree).

That evening, while I made dinner, Hannah started painting. We used acrylic paint this year so we covered the table and Hannah in plastic in an attempt to control the potential damage.

Her painting this year was much more thorough than last year, and rather than using a variety of colors on each bunny (like she did with the ducks), she covered each bunny in just one color.

The painting process went pretty quickly, probably because she's had a lot of practice at this point. I should take a picture of the wall that runs from our dining room to our kitchen to illustrate just how much practice she's had....we call it Hannah's gallery because it's covered in her art. She comes home from school with a new painting almost every day, and every day, we tape it to the wall. Some people think this is crazy, but I think it's fun. I don't plan on keeping all this stuff forever, and I don't hang it there because I'm overtly proud of my kid and think she's the next Picasso or anything; I really just think it's fun. The wall was boring and empty before because I never got around to decorating (beyond painting the walls), and I love the insanity and kitchiness of wall full of preschooler paintings. I like a house that's lived in. So the bunny painting happened pretty quickly....

The decorating, however, has taken weeks. Hannah tired of glittering them pretty quickly. We still have about 15 un-fancy bunnies patiently awaiting their turn to be fancified. I gave up on having a picture of them all "finished" and took a picture of what we had on Saturday morning so I could start passing these suckers out. Last year I didn't get most of them out until after the holidays and by then everyone had put away their Christmas stuff so this year, nobody knows where their ducks are. Anyway, our dining room table has been bunny central for long enough, and I'm ready to take it back.
 

I picked out my favorite bunny for our tree, and, lucky for me, Hannah was okay with letting me pick. She happily found a place for our bunny and then offered to pose with it while giving me her latest weirdo "smile" face.

It'll be fun to see how many salt dough ornaments cover our tree 20 years from now....maybe when she's older she'll opt for a non-salt dough ornament to mix things up a bit...Either way, a decade or two down the line, I should have a tree full of original ornaments (and so should a number of you if you keep them), and that is something awesome to look forward to.

Hannah goes to a puppet show

Every year I vow to take advantage of Free Fall Baltimore, and every year November comes before I have a chance to live up to that vow--but not this year! Last Sunday after yoga I was feeling crafty, even a little artsy, and motivated to do something other than sloth around the house like we normally do on Sunday afternoons. The weather was beautiful, but I was in no mood to follow Hannah around a playground, and although I was motivated, I wasn't that motivated so a hike was out of the question.

I ate my lunch at the breakfast bar in front of the computer while scrolling through the Free Fall activities and settled on a 3:30 puppet show at Black Cherry Puppet Theater in the downtown neighborhood of Union Square/Hollins Market. We got there around 2:30 to take advantage of the puppet making workshop before the show.

The workshop was pretty impressive. I assumed it would be paper bag puppets and some markers maybe, but nope. They had paper plates wrapped into cones. They put one cone on the child's fingers and another on the child's thumb (pointy side out) to make a giant mouth, then they wrapped the two cones in a fabric of the child's choosing, cut down the center to form a mouth, hot glued it, and then passed the kid to the next station where they picked pre-cut felt teeth, eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and whatever else they could think to do with the array of options. There were even feathers.

Hannah finished her puppet and was running around the yard enjoying the sunshine when Brody and Addison showed up. They always bring the fun meter up a few notches! Brody made his puppet and then him and Hannah modeled them while I attempted to capture the moment.

There was also another puppet-making station using Popsicle sticks which already had paper-mache heads glued on. Two really nice young girls were manning that table and helped Hannah give the one that she picked some hair, a cape, clothes, and a long green beard with a bow tied in it. Then the three kiddos retired to the yard to play with their puppets and hang out and wait for show time.

The show was the Frog Prince. Hannah was enthralled but afterwards she complained because the witch wasn't part of the show. She's a huge fan of all things scary these days and was really looking forward to there being a witch. After the lights came on, the puppet masters/theater owners brought the princess and horse puppet out for all the kids to touch and investigate.

This is an awesome Sunday afternoon afternoon activity when you're in the mood to do something you can feel good about without expending a lot of unavailable energy. I'll most definitely be keeping an eye on their performance calendar and taking Hannah to other shows in the future.

Another trip to DC

Hannah was off school for Yom Kippur so her and I took the train to DC that Wednesday to visit Amy and the museums, starting with the Air and Space Museum. We weren't sure Hannah would be interested in much there, but we gave it a go anyway. They have a whole kid section that we hit up first, and Hannah enjoyed running around pushing the buttons and test-driving the plane. She didn't get any of the science experiments that were linked to the button pushing, but then again, neither did I.

We walked around for a bit looking at the planes and shuttles and tried to figure out how astronauts poop in space. Hannah had to poop while we were there and while she was going, this thought occurred to her. I have talked to her about gravity but I don't think she really grasps that so my guess is that her question had more to do with "where's the bathroom" than "how do they poop." We walked through the model shuttle but couldn't see the bathroom. We never did find an answer to our question...

We walked around the gift shop next and Hannah picked out a space kitty and refused to put it down no matter how many interesting things I handed her. It's not that I'm opposed to this astronaut Hello Kitty doll, it's just that we have stuffed animals out the wazoo, and there are only so many that can be snuggled at a time. I'd love for her to have toys that she can do something with other than snuggle and cuddle. I found two books that looked really good, You Can't Do that Amelia! and Violet the Pilot. Neither were more exciting than the kitty though, so I gave up, bought her the kitty, and added those books to my Amazon wish list.

After the Air and Space Museum we walked over to the sculpture garden, ordered lunch at the cafe, and hung out near the fountain.

After lunch we went into the National Gallery of Art. 

We scoped out the dancer paintings they had by Degas and then realized that if we wanted to chill out in front of an Imax, we needed to book it over the National History museum. I was hoping to see the polar bear movie, but the only one that fit our window was the one about the coral reef. It was a good one. Next time I want to see the butterfly one! It wasn't released yet when we were there.

Speaking of butterflies, after the Imax, we checked out the gemstones and then went to the butterfly garden, even though we went there the last time we visited DC. It's so cool that we can't get enough. I heard that there is an even bigger and better butterfly garden somewhere in the DC area. When I Google it, the only thing that comes up is Brookside Gardens in Bethesda. My guess is that this is the place, but there's a thing on the website that says the Wings of Fancy Live Butterfly exhibit ended in September....so it looks like we missed it, but it also lists a butterfly garden in their list of gardens, so who knows, maybe there's always some sort of butterfly garden there. If anybody reading this knows anything about this place, leave a comment please!

In the meantime, the little garden in the museum is nice. Hannah sat very still hoping one would land on her.

The woman working there kept bringing one over and trying to get it to stay on her shirt, but they all fluttered away upon landing.

All except the green one, it stuck around for a while. These butterflies must be chill because it's the same one that landed on me last time we were there.

When Hannah got tired of it, she shooed it away, and we left. We checked out the model of the giant snake built based on the bones they found to the biggest snake ever, then swung through the dinosaur bones exhibit before heading back to Union Station.

We kept a pretty leisurely pace the whole day (except when we were running to catch the Imax), but we still covered a lot of ground and were totally exhausted by the end of the day and stayed that way for the next two days. I suppose exhaustion is a natural result of a really fun day.