Here's a little story to demonstrate that we are all, in this household, total freaks.
Last Sunday Jason called in sick to work. Yay! Family Day! We had an awesome breakfast of bacon and pancakes, and Maxine skipped off to park herself in front of the TV while we thought of what to do.
I remembered that the St. Louis Art Museum has Family Day on Sunday afternoons and we hadn't been in awhile. It's a great program, where they provide an art project for kids relating to something in the museum. It's really well-funded and organized, meaning, great art supplies, and they encourage parents to make their own project, too. (Many times there have I said, "Not now, Maxine, I'm almost finished!")
We started making a plan to go, but Maxine was dragging her feet, it seemed she'd rather lie around all day in her sundress, watching TV. "No, we are going," I said firmly. "Go put on a winter shirt and some tights. It's freezing outside."
"Yes, and put on a moustache, it's Moustache Day," Jason added. "See, I have one."
"Yeah, me too," I said, pulling a dreadlock over my lip.
Maxine dashed away before we even had a chance to find out whether she thought we were funny. Thirty seconds later, she returned, looking like this:
"Well," I said to Jason, "Should we let her go like that?"
"Hey, if you can't go to the art museum with marker all over your face, where can you go?"
We got there, and they had a fun project going on: making clay scarabs, painted turquoise, inspired by the Egyptian collection.
I dutifully reproduced a turquoise hippo from the museum's Egyptian catalogue.
Maxine made a turquoise mama hippo (for my baby hippo), a turquoise mama snake and a turquoise baby snake.
Jason made a turquoise moustache.
Then we bounced around the museum and made shadow puppets in the experimental film room.
When we got home, we all tried on the moustache, of course.
Yep. All of us:
