Horses

One of the days the heat index hit a hundred we retreated to the American Museum of Natural History with Yoav. P wanted one more go at the dinos before we went to Kansas, and the massive amounts of cold air sounded fabulous to me. The kids wandered around in the cool dark space filled with African animals, and it was nice :) We eventually made it to the whale room (of course!) but never made it to the whale. The ocean entry is flanked by two large walls filled with funky taxidermy. P has quizzed me on these critters for 2 years and I haven't made much headway on the nametagless names yet... This time we spied a guy tapping around on a computer screen, so P took a turn tapping. Lo and behold, there was a map of the wall with a fantastic interface of information. It was so exciting to watch him figure out that the map on the computer matched the sea life on the walls. And to then figure out how to navigate the screen animals to determine the names of the wall creatures.

Next we hit the horses exhibit, which, quite honestly, was a bit of a bore for the boy. With the noticeable exception of three parts: The trotting horse, the photos of which created a movie when a wheel was spun and the spinner looked through the slots. And the pooping horse. This, this was amazing. There was a huge screen that showed a life size horse. While the horse looked like a video (very real) the insides were superimposed on the video image. So when a women fed the video horse, you could watch the food go through the horse. Aaaaall the way through the horse. The third wow moment was the sculpture horse by Deborah Butterfield (a gorgeous bronze cast from carefully chosen driftwood pieces). P was so inspired by this that he's determined to find wood on the farm to make one for Grams and Gramps, horse lovers that they are :) Apparently that pooping horse really stuck with him too. Just this morning (a week later) he suddenly asked how horses poop ball shapes. Its funny to think that question has been rattling around in his head for the last week...