cartographers, animal enthusiasts, and disputes over corn

Since we had a half day off school we drove into the city on Martin Luther King day to enjoy a trip to the Field Museum. Amy had read about a new "Maps" exhibit that she thought Cole would be very into so that had been the original idea behind our visit. Amy and Steve treated Cole to the maps exhibit, while the rest of us ventured through hall after hall of animal exhibits.


Josiah brought MANY smiles and comments from other visitors to the museum that day. He would walk up to each window and rattle off: "side striped jackal, black backed jackal, spotted jackal, caracal, gerynyk, coyotes, red fox, silver fox, arctic fox, mexican wolf, grey wolf", etc. and that's just in one exhibit. Quite interesting, we noticed after a bit he would hesitate before saying each name, and upon looking closer we realized he was staring at the name cards before he would "read" each name. Up to this point his list of sight words has been growing but still a shorter list than probably most his age. Tom and I just cracked up to realize the boy has literally 100's of sight words under his belt...they just are all words you would find in an animal encyclopedia and therefore not words usually tested.


Sadly, "Sue" (the famous t-rex that used to enrapture his attention) got only a courtesy nod from Si on this trip.


Watching Maddie play in the interactive children's native American exhibit was a lesson in anthropology. There was a really neat adobe house, complete with corn thresher to "grind" your flour, then a fire over which to "bake" some bread. Outside the house was a field of corn in which you first "harvested" the corn. It was a great exhibit in that there was TONS of corn, plenty for a lot of kids to play together and each have basketfuls. But the self centered fallen nature of man was totally evident in the way those kids played. They just each wanted to hoard the corn...literally they stockpiled it (with the "lordking" guarding their pile and telling them to go get more). We played in there quite a while because this was Maddie's favorite part of the day. We saw several new groups of kids come in...each to be sucked into playing this style of game. Maddie was greatly offended that her corn kept getting stolen and had a hard time learning to defend herself (which amazed me because she has no trouble doing so at home). Like I said, quite a lesson in the study of man.