12 July 2013

the best thing i didn't buy from the museum shop

 

 

We are so darn lucky to have family to visit first in South Louisiana and then in Northern Virginia during the summer...two great places with lots of activities to keep us busy.

We spent the day at the Newseum in DC, easily one of my new favorite museums, but also where my innocent nine year old learned a lot about some serious topics: the bad guys of 9/11, the graphic horrors of war, the Unabomber, the shoe bomber, the assassination of a president, gun-carrying gangsters, and so on. She also spent lots of time studying some pretty heavy Pulitzer Prize-winning photography: Kent State, famine, Napalm bombs, Saigon, and Syria. You know, all those light parts of history.

So much for sheltering her from the violence of television and movies.

I wasn't prepared for this and had forgotten that most news is, well, tragic. I tried to be honest with answers to her questions, hoping that many of those images don't stick with her just yet. She has time to learn about them. I was a bit disappointed that she was not interested in the exhibit about presidential pooches. (I'm so lame.)

On another note...I can't believe that my first glimpse of an actual piece of the Berlin Wall was at a museum in DC. I even touched it. (Lame, again.)

 

Those mustache glasses, however, are so not lame. Nonetheless, they did not come home with us today.

I highly recommend this museum despite my reservations. There is, of course, much more to it than the few things I mentioned here.

 

1 comment:

  1. A few years ago, we went to Virginia and went to some of the museums and I didn't escape the shop so easily. We walked away with a civil war hat. The little kids like to play dress up with it though, so I guess it isn't such a bad thing. Virginia is awesome because their is so much to see and do from the D.C. area to Williamsburg and then Charlottesville. So much history. Enjoy!

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