That Time I Made Everyone Play Senet With Me

The set we're playing is from the university library (because of course it is, lol!), but this is it.

This might have been my quickest speed-run through a Special Interest yet, but for a very little while my entire mind was fixed on learning how to play Senet, teaching everyone else how to play Senet, and then wheedling those people into playing Senet with me.

It was fed by a couple of other low-key Special Interests, that of Historic Games and of Reskinning/Redesigning Games. I just think it would be really cool to pick a historic game like Senet, reskin it to look more like something that would be a family interest or family joke, and then construct it and give it out for, like, Christmas or something.

Part of that is that I like the historical time periods of my favorite games, Ancient Egypt for Senet and Mesopotamia for the Royal Game of Ur, for instance, but also they're always so pretty! Look at some of the beautiful Senet games in the Met!

I also like how generally simple the games are to learn, and how satisfying they are to play. Do you, too, get weary of trying to learn new games with a billion fiddly rules? Senet is SO much simpler to learn, but there are all kinds of interesting strategies to figure out. Also, we don't really know the actual rules, so my family and I like to make up our own rules. 

Playing Senet in 2013 at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, and DEFINITELY making up our own rules!

Here's the most accepted way to play Senet, with a bonus link to a printable Senet board and instructions.

Here are some DIY Senet board games:

• 3D Senet. This one is the biggest score! This public library's website links to a pdf for a cut, color, and assemble cardstock Senet game. It's got the graphics printed on it, as well as helpful fingers pointing the directions you're meant to go at every turn. If you didn't want all that detail, you could use the pattern as a template and draw your own designs.
• cardboard and painted figurines. Cardboard is my favorite, most accessible crafting supply! I love the use of miniature figurines, all of which you could probably find in your nearest toybox or thrift store.
• chessboard Senet. This is such a clever idea! I LOATHE using the Dollar Store as a source of craft supplies, but a thrift store would be just as cheap and easy.
• kid-made Senet. I don't think the fabric worked out great, but otherwise it's a lovely example of how even younger kids can DIY board games. And they're all so creative!

I think I'd want to make one on a nice sheet of wood, perhaps woodburned and watercolor stained or full-on painted in acrylics. The traditional game only has a few decorated panels but I think it would be fun to decorate every panel, maybe keeping to a storytelling theme like illustrating the progress of our England family vacation or the travels of Frodo Baggins.

I also kind of want to make a 3D one, box and all, out of Perler beads, though. Or maybe a quilted one that could also work as a placemat? How about one that masquerades as a book until you open it to see the game, with room to store the pieces inside?

Brainstorming a project is my favorite part!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...

The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gingerbread Cuneiform: Studying Mesopotamia

My teenager's combination World History/Art History study (that I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to record on her high school transcript...) is a TON of fun. We read the history and the art history, study the major artworks, read some literature or mythology, do something immersive, and write about it. I love it, and so far it seems pretty teenager-friendly, too!

My favorite parts of her Mesopotamia unit were listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh (the teenager ships Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and I can't say that she's wrong), envisioning the Ishtar Gate (not to be confused with the Gates of Ishtar, a Swedish metal band), figuring out the Sumerian genealogy of gods and goddesses (always a hit with my mythology-obsessed kid), and making this gingerbread cuneiform.

The idea--and the gingerbread recipe!--come from this Edible Archaeology post. We also followed the author's suggestion to use a disposable bamboo chopstick as a stylus, which led to a whole adventure of eating at several local Asian restaurants over the course of a couple of weeks, since every restaurant we went to happened to have the separated chopsticks with round ends, not the snap-apart ones with square ends!

Finally, we were met with success--and absolutely DELICIOUS ramen--at this little place tucked into an apartment complex behind the grocery store near the mall:

With the proper bamboo chopsticks and a batch of gingerbread dough, we were ready to write!

We did not follow the author's highly ambitious example of copying a large cuneiform tablet, because WHOAH. Instead, we cut small squares, then used the stylus to copy some of the examples from my teenager's world history textbook:

A chopstick makes a PERFECT stylus!

Baked, the impressions still showed perfectly!

Cuneiform sign meaning "god" or "sky"

Cuneiform sign meaning "day" or "sun"

The student scribe takes an art break!

older Cuneiform sign meaning "barley." Doesn't it look like barley?

Since we did this project right before Christmas, we went ahead and used this dough to also make gingerbread cookies, and the kids made their gingerbread houses. Eleven years into this beloved tradition, I'm now a devotee of melted sugar as glue, and I still think the houses look messy and gross, but nevertheless, they bring me joy:

A lot of hands-on history projects are just fun little craft projects that don't teach a ton about history; if you want your hands-on history project to be valuable for history, and not just a thematically-related activity, you do have to be vigilant. When the kids were very little, for instance, letting them build Egyptian pyramids out of sugar cubes didn't teach them anything about the history of Egypt, but it was a good STEM project and they loved it. But having them create salt dough maps of Egypt and paint and label them was also fun, and reinforced some useful information about Egypt that we still know, such as the fact that Upper Egypt was south and Lower Egypt was north because that's the way the Nile flows, and that the Delta is shaped the same as the Greek letter. 

There's nothing wrong with doing thematically-related but non-valuable projects, even with older homeschoolers--my teenager created this gingerbread Stonehenge during her Astronomy study, learning little about Stonehenge but a decent amount about gingerbread construction and hand-building, and it was fun! But this gingerbread cuneiform, we found, taught us a LOT about cuneiform, and therefore about Mesopotamia. We were all surprised to see how exactly the square stylus recreated the cuneiform, and how well the imprints stayed when baked. You wouldn't be able to recreate that nearly so easily by drawing the figures, but you could get a LOT of cuneiform onto even a hand-sized piece of clay, and that clay would be portable, durable, and virtually immortal. 

That's a lot of knowledge gained for oneself while also decorating cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to Christmas music!

We've spiraled through history throughout our homeschool years, or done interest-led unit studies non-chronologically, so I've built up a lot of Mesopotamia resources. Here are some of what we've enjoyed over the past dozen years:

• irrigation activity. Irrigation was critical to the development of Mesopotamian agriculture! Here's an idea for how to model an irrigation system. I think it would be cool to use chia seeds so you could build an actual working model!
• map of known ziggurats. Research these via YouTube or Google Images, place them in your salt dough map, glue thumbnail images to a wall map, flyover them in Google Earth, etc.
• Mesopotamia flashcards. Use these flashcards for matching or memory work. 
• popsicle stick war machines. If you read Story of the World (which you should!), you'll encounter Sargon the Great. You can use popsicle sticks to model some of the war machines that he used.
• Royal Game of Ur. You can't study Mesopotamia without playing this game found in a tomb in Ur!
• sexagesimal system. Mesopotamians counted in Base 60, something that you can still see reflected today in activities like measuring time (60 seconds, 60 minutes) and circles (360 degrees). Here's a starting point for researching the sexagesimal system, but I've found some great activities in books over the years that I pull out occasionally for math enrichment.
• Treasures of the UCLA Library: Cuneiform Tablets. My teenager and I watched this short video before beginning our side-hustle as cuneiform scribes. 
• write your name in cuneiform. This is a fun way to get just a taste of cuneiform writing
• Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors: An Activity Guide. This book has a good recipe for sebetu bread. Read more about sebetu and Mesopotamian recipes here. 
• The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Eyewitness Mesopotamia. Eyewitness books and Smithsonian Handbooks were the kids' JAM when they were little!
• The Lifeboat that Saved the World. The author is one of the Mesopotamia curators at the British Museum!
• Story of the World, Volume 1. You must listen to the audiobook of this, because Jim Weiss!

And the beloved spines of our current World History/Art History study:

• Archaeology: The Essential Guide to Our Human Past
• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages
• and lots and lots of images found via Google Images or downloaded from museum digital databases

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Mummy, the Carousel, and the Dinosaur Eggs: I Took a VERY Deep Dive into the History of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

2008

 I've started to get really interested in really deep dives into really specific topics. Disassociating by immersing oneself into a research project is such a pleasant feeling!

The history of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is one of my recent small obsessions. It's long been a special place for me and the kids, and it's been interesting to see how some of my favorite parts of the museum, such as its deep respect for children and its integration into the neighborhood in which it's placed, has manifested over the course of its existence. 

I found this 1982 museum-published history in my local university's library (along with some old speeches, guides to extinct galleries, and other interesting documents that I checked out and pored over), and I was riveted by the attention to small, vivid details that it brought to enliven what could have been an extremely dry museum history:

Most of the kids' favorite parts of the museum, such as their holiday celebration and dinosaur exhibit, are too recent to be in the book, but some, such as that carousel we ride every time we visit and the mummy we used to pay our respects to before Chicago took it back, are just as old.

2011

The story of the carousel is particularly interesting, and is a good example of the vivid details that I love most, the ones that would be completely lost to history without the work of journalists, anthropologists, and other historians who take an interest in first-person storytelling. The Broad Ripple Carousel dates to 1917, and operated in a local park until 1956, when the roof finally collapsed and destroyed it. By that time, the animals had been falling apart for a while, as well, getting no more than hasty, non-professional repairs. 

In 1965, the current director of the Children's Museum, Mildred Compton, tried to track down where these worn, broken, beloved 50-year-old carousel animals might have gotten to. This was back in the days when telephone tag apparently hadn't even been invented yet, because each check-in required her to take a physical trip to the physical office of the city's Parks and Recreation department. And because it's local government, mostly nobody had any idea what she was talking about. They'd sort of promise to look into it, but then whenever she'd check back in to pester whomever she'd wheedled that sort-of promise from, she'd find out that they'd left the department, someone new was in charge, and she had to ask them all over again, hear again that they had no idea what she was talking about, and again wheedle a new promise out of them to check into it.

2015

Eventually, Compton got the Parks and Recreation department to reckon that maybe they did have a few of the carousel animals in storage, and okay, fine, she could borrow two of them. They gave her two horses in godawful condition, and she got a local acquaintance to refinish them. He could do the sanding and oiling and repainting work okay, but he couldn't replace the tails, which had been real horse tails.

Did you know that as recently as the late 1960s there was a literal slaughterhouse in DOWNTOWN INDIANAPOLIS?!? And... it apparently regularly slaughtered horses, so much so that when Compton went down there to ask if she could maybe have a horsetail or two, they just showed her into a room where there lay a huge, bloody pile of horsetails??? She rifled through the pile until she found some that she thought might match the horses, then soaked and cleaned them herself in her own home.

2015

A few years passed, then in 1969, thanks to some excellent networking, Compton scored a promise from the Parks and Recreation department that the Children's Museum could have ALL of their carousel animals. Compton and a coworker went to the storage building to collect them, but the animals were in such terrible shape that they essentially ended up crawling around on the floor, trying to snag all the little broken-off pieces of body parts that were strewn around from over a decade of neglect. Even on the intact parts of the animals, the wood was split and warped, and the museum spent years sending the animals out a couple a time to professional restoration artists in Cincinnati. 

The original idea had been just to display the animals, because even though it was a children's museum, most of the museum exhibits weren't interactive yet, or really even hands-on. But then Compton went to a carousel convention (lol!), and the carousel enthusiasts convinced her that what she really ought to do is buy a vintage carousel mechanism and turn her restoration into a living, working carousel again.

2020

Which would be so cool! Except, the museum didn't have the complete set of original animals from that Broad Ripple carousel. There were supposed to be three leaping stags in among all the other prancing animals, but they hadn't been in that storage building. When Compton checked in about it, a staffer told her flat out that they had disintegrated, but that felt... suspicious.

So the museum literally got the local newspaper to run a column asking for the public's help to provide any information about these long-missing stags. And one day, an anonymous informant called the museum. He was all, "The Parks and Rec department has your stags. Go to this year's Christmas show and see."

2022

And wouldn't you know it, but when the Parks and Rec department put on the 1973 Christmas show, guess who was on the float pulling Santa's sleigh?

Three. Wooden. Stags.

Compton marched herself back to the Parks and Recreation department and gave them a lecture entitled "Did you NOT tell me that I could have ALL the carousel animals?"

2010, with a broken leg, riding a stag

And that's how the museum came to have a working 1917 carousel, stags and all, on the top floor! Fortunately, the carousel idea came around as the museum was working on plans to demolish the historic house they'd been operating out of and build a brand-new museum building in its place. The plans had to be altered to allow for the size and weight of the carousel, and it's on the top floor of the museum because that's the only place they could make those adjustments without having to pretty much start over from scratch.

2019, just having come from the temporary exhibit of Greek antiquities, riding a stag

I think the museum's emphasis on dinosaurs must have gotten started in the early 1970s, when that magical Mildred Compton convinced the owner of some of the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, found in the Gobi Desert from 1922-1923. The donor was the widow of Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition leader of the group that discovered the eggs. Others of these eggs are at the American Museum of Natural History, and I'm not totally sure how he got some in his personal possession? I've actually got the book he wrote about this expedition, as well as some other books about him, on hold for me at the local university library, so I'm sure I'll know soon!

2010, taking the skin off a model T-rex so we can see its guts

Another long-time museum artifact that the kids don't remember--but I do!!!--is Wenuhotep, the mummy that the Children's Museum had on display from 1959 until the Art Institute of Chicago demanded it back in 2007. I remember there being some hard feelings about that return, because the museum had actually been permanently given the mummy by the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and they didn't know that the institute had only, itself, been borrowing that mummy from the Art Institute and therefore didn't have permission to give it away?!? So it was bittersweet to be reading about that titular mummy in this Children's Museum history, seeing how they built it a special exhibit when they remodeled and had it X-rayed so they could offer a more nuanced depiction of it to their visitors.

2011, during a homeschool class about Ancient Egypt

The kids and I did see Wenuhotep on exhibit a few years later at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it looks like in 2014 they did do some interesting studies of it, but it's been off exhibit there for quite a while. 

2013, in the Ancient Egypt exhibit (there's now a model mummy that kids can interact with)

It sure as heck wouldn't be off exhibit at the Children's Museum, is all I'm saying...

As happens with all the best deep dives, I now have a huge stack of books on adjacent topics to deep dive into--the Gobi Desert dinosaur finds! The ethics of displaying mummies in museums!--and a list of exceedingly tedious questions to ask the next time the kids and I volunteer at the museum--"Say, you wouldn't happen to have that 1920s model of the scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears that your first museum curator made out of trash because the museum had so few exhibits handy for me to look at, would you? Um, and maybe can I also see the original museum logo, the giant wooden seahorse, that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dad commissioned? And maybe that arrowhead that was plucked from the corpse of a pioneer child, too?"

Here's to continuing to hide from all of my problems snugged up safely in the womb of academe!