Sunday we took Jake to the Lawrence Hall of Science and had a great and geeky day!
The Minister’s Cat is a preoccupied cat.
The trip down there was a somewhat unpleasant peek into my life when Jake is a teenager. An hour and a half with Steve playing on his phone and Jake playing on his iPod. Was anyone talking to me? Heck no, I’m just the chauffeur. Once we got to the Hall, however, it was game on!
The Minister’s Cat is an experimental cat.
Jake got to be in an experiment on the development of logical reasoning in kids for some Cal grad students. He was his usual charming self, but we had to tell them that the results were probably skewed. They put 4 blue, 4 red, and 14 green bricks in a bag and asked Jake what color one pulled at random would be. Of course Jake said “green.” However, we had to tell them that, in all honesty, green is his favorite color and he probably would have said green in any scenario. Still, it was fun being part of science!
The Minister’s Cat is a fossilized cat.
We also got to see a REAL triceratops fossil. Not the plaster cast, but the real deal. Mommy was really probably more excited than anyone.
The Minister’s Cat is a memorable cat.
Jake’s favorite things were the pin wall, the paper airplanes, and the rocks outside that let you experience an “earthquake.”
Steve liked the paper airplanes best.
I liked playing Minister’s Cat on the car ride home, but I’m geeky that way (obviously). It’s really no wonder that Jake’s vocabulary scores for school were at the top of the chart.
The Minister’s Cat is a clever cat.
The child is clever but entirely random. One of the things we’re working on is getting him to give us context before asking a question: “In Kung Fu Panda 2, why does…” and so on. Sometimes he still leaves it out and the questions can get tricky. On the way to Berkley we got this stumper: “Why is there so much water in trash cans?” WHUCK? When we got it narrowed down to MegaMind, the question became a little more understandable. If you haven’t seen the movie, after MegaMind takes over Metro City/San Francisco he falls for the intrepid reporter, Roxanne Richey. When she laments how full of garbage the city has become, MegaMind takes he dehydration gun around the city and zaps all the garbage into tiny blue cubes to clean up. So, what Jake wanted to know is why, when you take the water out of a garbage can, is it only a tiny cube. Think about that for a second: to ask this question you have to know what dehydration is, that hard things like garbage cans don’t have that much water in them (unlike soft things like, say, a person), and you have to have a basic grasp of the conservation of mass. Wow. Awesome question, Dude. I’m totally putting my money on you for a future Nobel Prize.
The Minister’s Cat is a tired cat.
After a long and super fun day, Jake was asleep early. So was I, but nothing could possibly be more fun or awesome than a day in a science museum with my favorite guys!
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