St. Louis and Indianapolis

Reese with a Pharoah head dress

She caught a "fish".

Sitting on a spyhnx in the kids' Egypt exhibit

In an Indy car

In the ocean exhibit in a submarine

Looking at fossils

Dad, Reese, and me on the skywalk from the parking garage to the museum

Me with my medals after my dance competition

We went up to St. Louis for a feis (fesh), an Irish dance competition, last weekend (the 24-27). I competed at the St. Louis An Samhra Feis, and I got 1 gold and 2 silvers. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I'm pretty proud that I did well. It's nice to represent your school well, especially when you're the only dancer from your school there.

We drove to Terre Haute, Indiana, after the feis was over and stayed the night there. For the second night in a row, Reese got to go swimming (Mom took her swimming Friday night to try and get some of her energy out, seeing as she'd been in the car all day). I went with Mom and Reese and we played in the pool for a while. Reese "swam" between Mom and I (a distance of maybe 2 feet and someone's hands were on her the whole time), and she hopped from the ladders into our arms. The pool in Terre Haute was 4 foot deep at it's deepest. So not too bad. Taller than Reese, yes, but Mom and I didn't have to worry about accidentally stepping in too deep water.

The next day, we went up to Indianapolis to go see the King Tut exhibit at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. If you get a chance to see King Tut, you really should (no, King Tut is not in the exhibit, but there is a lot of nifty things from his tomb), but I don't recommend bringing young children. If they can't respect it, they shouldn't be there, in my opinion. One kid in our showing touched a statue and set off alarms, and I got to listen to a couple of kids giggle and be generally disrespectful because some of the statues had nudity in them. I wouldn't take Reese, she would've been a huge pain and Dad and I wouldn't have been able to enjoy it. But seeing as it was in a children's museum, Mom was able to take Reese to explore while Dad and I went through the exhibit. With Reese's attention span being roughly a grand 10 seconds for most things, they went through 3 floors in the period it took us to do 1 exhibit. Some variety of the exhibit is in Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Toronto right now (or, in Toronto's case, will be soon). It's been in Chicago and Dallas, that I know of.

The Children's Museum is awesome. It's the world's largest, 5 stories total. The vast majority of it is hands-on and what isn't is, logically, behind glass. Or in the case of the Tut exhibit, set aside. Reese had a good time. She doesn't get to go many places where she's free to touch as she pleases. It's a rarity to be able to just let a kid wander and touch (under supervision, of course) without worrying that they'll break it, drop it, or otherwise harm it. Or themselves. It has a carousel from the late 1800s, early 1900s. It's been redone and is functional again. It's a dollar a person, but Reese loved it.