Catchy Field Trip Day

I'd been meaning to take the kids to the NC Museum of Natural Science to do some drawing, been meaning to check out the NC History Museum across the way and I'd been meaning to stop by the chocolate factory downtown to pick up their free cocoa bean shells to use in the garden for a very long time. 

Always an over achiever I decided to catch up on all that... today.   Amazingly, not only did we do it all we all had an absolutely marvelous time. 

I told the boys in the morning that if they finished all their school work before 1pm we'd go to museum to draw.   Motivation is a great thing, we were out the door at 12:45pm.

My plan was to spend an hour at the natural science museum drawing and then an hour at the history museum drawing. 

The first part of my plan worked out.  We went to the second floor, where I felt the greatest variety of subjects for drawing existed, got out our tools and began to draw. Amber stayed with me and the boys spread out and we all drew, even me.

After a while everyone gathered together ready to move on when Titus spotted the special exhibit sign. I didn't want to pay money to see the special exhibit (the museum is free) and I said so, but Titus pointed out "This one is free!".  Apparently a generous patron had covered the cost. With my objection nullified into the "Dig It" exhibit we went.

It turned out to be a really neat exhibit. They had core samples from every state, neat hands on exhibit illustrating how water moved through the three main soil types, a cute entertaining detective show and best of all the Kinetic sand table with an interactive topography laser mapping.

The boys shared the table for a bit with other kids.  Once they had it all to themselves I sat down because who wouldn't want to play with that for a long time (I even took a turn for a bit). 

However, that did take a large chunk of our allotted time so I suggested doing the History Museum another day but the kids still wanted to check it out.

As the trend continued, I was glad we did.  The museum was much more impressive than I expected. We planned to just run through and see the Wright Brothers plane (full scale model) but ends up lingering a bit.  I was taken in by the signs that said "Please Touch".  Wow! A museum actually made for kids to visit!  The boys even sat down to watch the video about he NC involvement in the Revolutionary War.  The Museum is laid out as a twisting timeline of history so the Revolutionary War seemed a good place to stop.  We ran ahead through time to see the plane but we'll be back again soon!

That was more than enough activity for one day but we still had one more stop downtown.  This too went well.  We managed to get four free bags of Cocoa Bean shells for the garden.  Well, not really free as we ended up buying some samples of their chocolate but everyone had been so good I couldn't resist.  That was the end to our "Catchy Field Trip Day".