Stahlke Adoption

Museums--Shh!

When the children first came, there was a quick way to doom any outing. If we used the word "museum" (a cognate with Ukrainian), some of the children would absolutely refuse to go. It made me wonder what kind of museums they had visited. Jonathan and I had to be creative in our descriptions (e.g., a children's museum became a children's "center").

The first year, Jonathan's parents gave us a membership to the Brookfield Zoo, which we enjoyed a great deal. The second year, we joined the Museum of Science and Industry, since the parking fees alone pay for the membership. For our third year, we've joined the Adler Planetarium, mostly since Paul has shown an interest in space.

Paul's curiosity about space first became apparent when we visited Washington, D.C. in June 2006. We stopped at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall and looked around for a while. Paul and I were walking through the exhibits on the early U.S. space program, which emphasize the Apollo flights and famous people such as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrich, and James Lovell.

Paul moved fairly quickly through the exhibits, but came to an abrupt halt at the one exhibit on the early Russian space program. "Yuri Gagarin!" he exclaimed. "We studied him a lot in school. He's very famous." The displays were full of Russian terms, in Cyrillic, and Paul looked at everything very carefully.

I had never heard of Yuri Gagarin, but have since learned that he was the first human in space and the first to orbit the earth. And some people think that propaganda was exclusive to the Soviet Union and not the United States!

posted by Stahlkes @ 5:01 PM