The museum wasn't that fun for her because most things were behind glass, ropes, or hanging from the ceiling. There wasn't a lot to touch. This room, however, was entirely different. It was a special room with all sorts of things you could touch or see close up. John, Margaret's friend, met us and escorted us in, telling my daughter he had a wolf pelt she could feel if she wanted.
My daughter was initially timid, but John had a calm, encouraging demeanor as he opened sliding drawers to bring out things she could touch. I'm going to forget everything she "saw" because there was just too much.
She felt the fur of a beaver. She got to see what the feet and claws were like and the teeth that never stopped growing as well as the tail. She compared it to a mink fur and some other small animals. They talked about the outer coat and undercoat and how the undercoat was softer, and could she feel the difference?
He had some skulls to let her feel. How big was a cat's head (and by correlation, brain) compared to a bobcat's skull? What about the mandibles of different animals? What did a horse's skull feel like, and how were the teeth different given that they grazed on grass instead of eating other animals? She touched them each all over.
He asked her if she was ready then to touch that wolf's pelt? Yes, she was ready. I wasn't ready for what he pulled out because while I know a wolf is sizeable, an entire pelt with claws and footpads is impressive. She wrapped herself up in it and felt it all over. The tail of the wolf was huge and fluffy and long. She felt the ears and head and checked it out all over. He wasn't done with impressive animals, though. Next, he opened a long drawer and pulled out an entire black bear pelt. It was large, but it was from a small bear, he told us.
She was so interested in the bear's fur. It was very, very thick. Each hair was thick and long, and there was a denseness to it. She felt the paws and counted the claws and felt how large the claws were in comparison to the other animals. She wanted to be underneath it, be the bear. We told her about how a mother bear would not hesitate to protect her babies if she thought they were being threatened by humans. He also told her bears were vegetarians and weren't violent creatures—he had seen some not that long ago on a trip to the mountains.
We went to the next row, and she held birds wings. Large birds like hawks and owls. She felt how the feathers were organized to make a full wing that was spread out to fly. She felt the edges of the owl's wing feathers, which were serrated such that they could fly silently to sneak up on their prey.
He had her shake a rattlesnake tail and then showed her many different kinds of turtle and tortoise shells, including a large sea turtle one we put on top of her so she could pretend to be a sea turtle. She held lots of large shells and listened for the ocean in them all. John had to leave for work at that point, but we stayed and took her to feel the deer head and neck, mounted in such a way as to show what a taxidermist does to preserve an animal hide. The deer was larger than she had expected.
The last thing we did was go over to an area that had plastic versions of human bones, all jumbled on a table with an assembled skeleton beside it for reference. I told my daughter to hold up a bone, guess what part of the body it went with and then see if Aunt Margaret knew the answer, reminding her how Aunt Margaret was a doctor and that she could give Aunt Margaret a test.
Margaret told her about each bone she picked up. She was interested in the patella bone as she could feel her own kneecap to find that bone on her. She was a little skeptical that the skull was actually the skull until we had her compare it in shape and size with her own head.
Before leaving, we went back to the pelts area and got some pictures and videos with her and the pelts. She held a fox pelt and recorded a message to her brother (who's middle name is Fox) and told him if he came to the museum, he could see the fox too.
Then we went to one of my daughter's favorite parts of the museum to finish our day's adventure. This was one of the places she'd been to with Mrs. Jane before and always had a good time there—the cafeteria.
Here are a few pictures of her today at the museum:
The Big Boy Chronicles: My daughter has spelling words every week at school. She's been doing this for two years now. She's very good at spelling. We know this from all the typing she does on her braillewriter. Her brother, in Montessori fashion, has no homework. What he brings home by way of completed work doesn't show how it's completed at school. I got something home yesterday that he wrote while on a field trip, not in the classroom. I could barely read it for all the misspellings. It was on all kinds of words, including easy ones he should have known how to spell long ago. He spelled both my and my husband's names wrong not long ago, which I thought was him being frustrated with us making him write his own bio for the school family album. Now I'm not so sure. I think he might really not know how to spell our names. We're going to start some spelling games here at home to help and I'm going to ask his teacher about it when we have his parent-teacher conference coming up.
The Tiny Girl Update: An update on daughter's appointment with a doctor from Infectious Diseaseases was promised, I believe, and I forgot to do so last night. Infectious diseases sounds dire, but when something is a mystery, sometimes this group of doctors can be of help when other doctors are at a loss. We didn't learn much new from the appointment as my daughter had, we thought, gotten another UTI on Friday and I'd started treating her for it with higher doses of her prophalactic antibiotic (which had reduced her symptoms in twenty-four hours).
We're on the lookout for any additional infections and will have them cultured next time to see if it's still e-coli or something different. We're going to have a few additional tests done to see if there is something anatomically going on that's causing my daughter to not be able to completely empty her bladder or possibly folds trapping bacteria. For now, we finish the current course of medication and then go back on one maintenance antibiotic per day. The good news is, this isn't compeltely unheard of—recurrent bladder infections—and the low dose of this particular antibiotic only resides in her bladder when taken at night and doesn't factor in really with antibiotic resistance in her body.
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