At the Art Museum
TwinkleToes had speech therapy this morning, meaning I needed to take the morning off. But, I decided to take the whole day off today to spend with my girls. Life is short, they are out of school, and it just felt right.
The Art Museum isn’t too far from speech therapy, and it’s been a while since we’ve been.
As we walked into the current special exhibit the museum employee stationed in that area looked at us with dread. I guess when you’re responsible for the safety of a museum exhibit and you see someone walk in with what appears to be a two year old (yeah, she’s four, but she wears mostly 2t’s and still a few of her 18 month clothes) then there is probably reason to feel a little dread. She couldn’t know that my kids behave. Anyway, TwinkleToes saw the look and grabbed my pants’ leg, and the museum person said “Yes, you should hold onto your…”, and then there was a pause as she looked from TT to me and back to TT and she said “… guardian”.
I gave a short pause myself as I decided how to respond, but decided to mostly ignore it and just tousled TT’s hair and said, “I think she means you should stay close to mommy, but you knew that already, OH! look at the..” and we started looking at the exhibit.
We were shadowed for a while and I could see interest from Mrs. Grumpy Museum Person as TT and GG and I were talking about things like horizon lines, and use of color, and what kind of media was used, and what in the picture showed detail and what was just giving us the idea of what something was without detail, and how the artist had used shadows to show where the light was coming from, and that kind of thing.
On a painting of a bat, we talked about how the bat’s eyes were black, but the artist had shown us something reflected in the bat’s eyes. The three of us looked in each others eyes and noted what we saw reflected, and the previously grumpy museum employee told us there was a hands on exhibit that hadn’t been turned on yet, but she could turn it on if I was interested in letting the kids play around with it. Of course, I was interested, and the girls had a blast with the hands on part of the exhibit.
Once we made it out of the special exhibit area and into the permanent part of the museum, I had this problem of GlitterGirl dissolving into giggles every time we came upon a nude figure. This is new, and I’m not really sure how to go about convincing her that the nude form isn’t funny, it can be beautiful. I tried to draw her away from the idea of nudity, talking about how hair was fixed, whether the person looked happy or sad or angry or wistful or whatever (her answer was always “embarrassed”), what we thought the person was doing (besides “being embarrassed”). I only had limited success, most of the discussion around the nudes was done between TwinkleToes and me while GlitterGirl was giggling like a maniac. I’m thinking that when she gets out of the tub (where she is currently) that maybe she and I can have a discussion about that. I’m guessing she felt ill at ease about it and compensated with laughter so she wouldn’t have to deal with it. Sounds like another “time and place for everything” discussion is in order.
The tightwad in me didn’t want to leave after we’d paid the exorbitant ticket price and had viewed a little less than half of the museum. But, we were there for two and a half hours with both kids totally engrossed in each piece of art we viewed and talked about (well, except for GG and the nude forms), and it was close to lunch time, and it felt like it was time to go while this was still a very positive experience. So, we left without seeing the entire museum. But that’s okay, we had a great time.
Before having kids, I had this idea of how things would be with my kids. Most days do not fit into that ideal. Today did.