Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Happy Birthday Mr. President(s)

At breakfast yesterday we discussed the real reason Dad was home again, another holiday, the joys of banking.President's Day celebrates the birthdays of two Presidents, who might they be? They got Washington, and then Lincoln once we offered a physical description. Then I went about quizzing them on Presidential order, Washington, Adams, Jefferson...my husband fell deep into his pancakes. When we got to the part in our morning history lesson where I announced that they could chose their favorite patriot and that Adams was mine, he looked up, "Allyson, not everyone has a favorite patriot, many don't even have a favorite President. You are a geek". Jack was in the math club in high school so I have a very hard time taking a line like "you are a geek" from him. I continued.

We spent President's Day at the Art Museum, one of my favorite places in the city, and for the month of February, free to all. Mary and Kate have about a two hour window of interest at the Art Museum. At first they run like mad from room to room, inquisitive about the biggest paintings they see: why is Jesus bleeding? why is that man holding a head? her booby is popping out! We moved on from the European rooms. The early American area entertained them for quite some time, pieces they recognize or can begin to understand, and of course, plenty of body parts. Mary sat in front of this sculpture for quite a few minutes while we moved about the room. "BUM!" The entire room knew she had found her way to the back.

My friend Allison is a curator here and on our last visit she gave us a very interesting behind the scenes tour. While wandering a room of priceless paintings, all in various stages of restoration, Kate announced "this is less than interesting. Can we move on to another area?". Thankfully Allison is a both a curator and a mother to a four year old.

Recently we discovered that the girls can count to twenty and beyond in Spanish, but they struggle with English after about 15. They've named their dolls after a Senator and now the President but had little interest in sitting still to watch every minute of the televised inaugural. Math and history may be out but soon enough they will find their own geek'ness, perhaps art, maybe music, possibly science. Embrace it and be the very best geeks you can be.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you forget about Ron and Nancy?? On our door, no less!

northsidefour said...

I had some odd fascination with the Reagans. In fact, when he died we were visiting the inlaws and I had a heated conversation with Jack's dad as to if he needed to lower his Perkins size flag he flies in the front yard. I lost, flag kept flying but, really, out of respect, put that thing down.

I think it was the over the top'ness of the whole administration. I blame Mimi.

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