Mold-A-Ramas at the Field Museum

We're getting better at these little jaunts down to Chicago on our quest for Mold-A-Ramas!  We've hit nearly every site that has them in the Windy City.  Yesterday we went to the Field Museum.

Ian stayed behind to help out at home, but I went with the kids, my mom, my brother and his wife.  I'd never been to the Field Museum before, and of my kids only Aden had visited on a school trip a couple of years ago.  My brother will be starting a position as an associate researcher there soon, so we're hoping on return visits to get a behind-the-scenes tour.  For this trip the actual, uh, in-front-of the scenes tour, was plenty.

The Field Museum was packed.  I don't know if the day after Thanksgiving was just a good family outing day or if it's usually that full, but I liked seeing so many people enjoying such a beautiful space and learning things instead of shoving people aside to buy cheap electronics (which is apparently our modern tradition and it depresses me to no end).  The staff at that museum right on down to the guy emptying the garbage cans was exceptionally friendly and nice.  Even the cafe food was delicious.  And our membership to Discovery World here in Milwaukee was reciprocal so we got in free!  All around, a great experience.

Things Mona Makes

I love my Mona.  She's an interesting little artist, that girl.

Mona's recently started using wire on the interior of her paper creations.  I discovered her unwittingly destroying a perfectly good pair of scissors while cutting lengths of some floral wire she came across, so I gave her some needle nose pliers with a wire cutter to better do the job.  She now starts her creations with a wire skeleton of sorts, then molds paper around that, then completes it with a skin of colored duct tape.

Unfortunately, my photographs don't do her work justice.  When you can hold them in your hands and turn them they are really remarkable.  In pictures they just look sort of distorted and flat, but at least you can get an idea of what her work is like.  She just dashes these things off like it's nothing.  I wish I could salvage more of them to save for posterity, but she makes them to be used as toys and they end up getting pretty battered.  I still regret not saving her lobster from a couple of years ago because all I have of it now are the pictures.  This photo is from two years ago when she just started working in duct tape, but is that not an impressive lobster for a seven-year-old?

Anyway, lately Mona's been into dinosaurs and birds.  Here is her recent collection dinosaurs: