art museum

Our day was much better today.  We had a really good trip to the National Gallery and checked out several Van Gogh paintings.  I was thinking about why this trip went so well (compared to a few others in the past), and this is what I came up with:

1.  L wanted to help pack our lunch, which I allowed him to do.  No whining at lunch time!

2. We looked at You Can't Take a Balloon into the National Gallery, by Weitzman and Glasser, that my mother-in-law sent awhile ago. It had some reproductions throughout, and the kids kept saying, "Look!  That one was in the book!"

3.  We took the Metro with Jomo on his way into school, so the kids got to hang out with Dad for half of the ride.  

4.  I brought along things for them to do on the train ride (Pokemon handbook and a library book).

5.  I stopped before we walked into the museum and told them the rules about museum behavior.  So glad I did this (though it did need to be repeated a couple of times).

6.  A nice woman at the information desk gave the kids "picture hunt" sheets, and the kids were excited about finding the different pictures.

7.  We ate lunch first thing.

7.  The baby fell asleep in the stroller after lunch.

8.  We kept the trip short.  We saw the Matisse cut-outs that Z was excited about, then tried to find a few pictures from the "picture hunt," then sat on the couch in front of the Van Gogh's for a bit.

9.  I had five bucks in my pocket (I normally don't carry cash) which we used to give the kids a ride on the carousel at the end.

Certainly we had some difficult moments, and some tiredness, but all in all a pretty good visit!

L and Z both picked out their favorites of the Van Gogh's to take a picture with.

I let the kids each pick out a postcard from the art store, and Z chose this Matisse cut-out.  She ripped the white space around the piece because it was distracting, but then went on to draw her own versions of it, including a "ballerina" one.  I love her enthusiasm about art!

This has nothing to do with the museum, but I wanted to post these before and after pictures of Z's handwriting.  She was doing copywork with Psalm 23 over several weeks.  I tried to tell her to slow down and use her best handwriting, but she wasn't too interested.  I didn't care too much, but I thought I'd try out a Charlotte Mason idea which was to work on one stroke, one letter, one word at a time and basically require perfection.  So we gave it a shot, and I'm very pleased with the result.  I underlined letters that she needed to redo, which she wasn't too happy about.  But she did slow down after a couple of days, and now she's even voluntarily using this beautiful handwriting on her own sometimes.

Before

After