At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Such a good museum.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has a lot going for it. With elements of an old-school natural history museum, it's still got plenty of those stuffed animal dioramas that we're all suckers for in our family, and lots of minerals behind glass cases to pore over, and explications of plate tectonics, etc., but it's also an ASTC passport site, which means we get in free(!!!), AND it has what amounts to a small zoo out back, with cool animals like raccoons and red foxes and barn owls that are far more novel to the girls than the elephants and giraffes that they've seen in every zoo that they've been to since birth.

I thought that the galleries were set up nicely, as well, with ample room for photographs in the dinosaur gallery, and as we found much in the museum to fit in with the girls' current areas of interest, I took lots of photos that will soon be mounted on timelines and in scrapbooks and put to other good homeschool uses:

Sydney and the Haplocanthosaurus

Willow and the Dimetrodon

Willow and the T. Rex

Willow and Sydney and the Triceratops

The sign said that Lucy, the Australopithecus aferensis model pictured here, was, although a full-grown female, the size of a modern six-year-old child. What do you think?

Hmmm...definitely a little taller than a five-year-old child:

Life Cycle of the Silkworm

Considering that I had begun the day disappointed that the previous day's craft fair had been pretty much a bust and thus we were not going to be sightseeing at the zoo or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at which we'd have to pay admission, I finished up delighted with Museum of Natural History.

Now if only Syd hadn't pitched a fit in the gift shop, requiring that she be immediately perp-walked back to the car empty-handed, I could have bought that Evolution Happens bumper sticker that I really wanted, and then the day would have been completely perfect!