What's Up?

Well, we are still dealing with a camera whose flash rarely works, so no pictures.
Here's what we've been up to:

Tuesday we narrowly escaped death by a large, falling tree branch. We were at Musser Park for a Tot Spot meet-up with kids and parents from the play co-op. It was a warm, humid day and we were all enjoying the shade as the kids played. It was a sunny day with almost no wind, but all of a sudden, we heard the crack of a tree breaking, a huge branch (as in more than a foot in diameter) crashed down onto the fence, the shade where our children had been playing, and poking into the play structure. Fortunately no one was under it at the time. One of Owen's buddies, Devon, was in the play structure but was fine. The branch also hit the sidewalk and his mama Melissa's car parked on the street. (I have pictures on my phone but have not spent the $30 to get a cord to get them onto the 'puter. If/when I do, I'll post them.)

Wednesday we went to Hands on House with Courtney and Penelope. We'd been once last year and were not impressed, but so many folks seem to like it that we decided to give it another go. There was a ton of kids there, and lots of them were from a big summer recreation group so there were lots of big, unsupervised kids there. Fair enough. What can you expect on a summer week day? It lived up to my memories as a place with lots of plastic stuff to play with. Furthermore, I had forgotten some of the more colorful "exhibits." In order of increasing offensiveness, here are my least favorite areas:
3) The factory - You assemble (yes, on an assembly line) plastic dodads (whiffle balls, PVC pipe lengths, and key rings) into spaces on a wooden tray, quality check it, and take it back apart as you sort the bits back out. Owen is not really into directions, and, uhhhh, I find it kind of odd that a bourgeois establishment would set out to make kids into good factory workers.
2) The corn farm - Yes, monoculture at it's finest has been brought in to teach children about growing crops, feeding pigs, and suppling grocery stores, processing plants, and factory farms. Yay! You can pick (or grow) ears of plastic corn as you velcro it onto the stalks on the wall. Even this indoor re-creation of the monoculture corn farm is completely dependent on oil. While on the farm, corn is grown with great imputs of subsidized oil (including tractor fuel, fuel for shipping, and the host of *chemicals* corn needs to make it), here the corn is literally made of oil. Owen wanted to shuck the corn, but, alas!, the plastic shucks would not come off the plastic kernels. There are cards you can use to fill the orders for the grocery store and the processing plant as well as the factory farm, and you can feed the plastic corn to a plastic pig. Well, you can put it in a trough at his feet at least. Um, does anybody else see anything odd about this?
1) The egg battery - Oh my, this is the worst of all. At least the factory and the commerical monoculture farm areas are supposed to seem inviting and interesting, but an agg battery - for children to work in!?????? What were they thinking? There is a rather graohic picture of leghorn chickens in an egg battery. It's similar to this one retrieved from a vegan website:

So, what vegans are using to sway the rest of us to give up eggs, the Hands on House sees fit to use as decoration on an educational booth. Anyway, the activity is to sort the good eggs and line them up in cartons and put out the bad eggs with cracks drawn on them. It's sad that chickens live like this. I believe that people are evolved to thrive on animal foods - including meat and eggs. I also believe that it is our responsibility as consumers to eat the most humane diet we can, and I believe that this necessarily includes meat, milk, and eggs - from animals raised on pasture and treated with respect throughout their lives. No, animals aren't people, but do people really still believe that good food comes from animals who live like this? I find it even more ironic and sad that within a 5-10 minute radius of the museum, there are probbaly more than 25 small farms where you can buy eggs from hens running around in yards eating worms and bugs and grass.

Thursday, we went with our play group to the North Museum. Owen liked the "Air Play" exhibit, but was a bit less into it than the other times we visited as he had an audience of friends. The exhibit included an air cannon (You aim it and hit a membrane on one end to make a blast of air shots out of a small hole at the other end and hit a board full of shiny, fluttering disks.), numerous forced air contraptions where you covered different holes and made foam balls move through tubes, a maze with a ball that moved as you opened different slots, sail boats that moved across and into the wind, a fan contraption that created a vacuum that pulled foam shapes up a tube, and a bouncy ball floating over a fan. Yeh, they totally stole that last one from the Wal-Mart display! I also got to whiz through the physics picture exhibit in the upper gallery. Owen made 2 rounds! I had seen it earlier, and it was really neat. There were photos from students across the US. The students had made some incredible photos that were not only artistic but also demonstrated physical phenomena which they detailed in short descriptions. There was one of a water balloon exploding where the water still retained the shape of the balloon, a few long exposures showing people and objects traveling in arcs, inverted lanscapes reflected in drops of water, and lots of other really cool photographs. I'd love to have some of those hanging on my wall.

Friday - Saturday, Owen, Abram and I camped out at Gifford Pinchot State Park. On the way there we stopped in York to avoid a tremendous thunderstorm. When we arrived at the park, it was sunny, and Owen and Abram enjoyed playing in the lake while I read Placenta: The Gift of Life by Cornelia Enning - an interesting read but not particularly helpful and not really worth having to get it ILL (through Abram). I'll share more on it later. We had quite a time getting the fire started, but we cooked hot dogs and ate them with sauerkraut in the dark. It was hard for Owen to go to sleep that night. Owen make friends everywhere we go, and he found some big girls across from us to play with. After a breakfast of coconut flour pancakes and sausage, Owen helped we wash up the dishes at the common sink where we met another new friend. As we were headed back, a family with several big kids came up and exclaimed, "Owen!" Apparently the whole camp new him. He is fantastic if I do say so myself! They had another good swim before we took advantage of nap time to drive back home to comfort our lonely cats.

Today, Owen and I spent the morning at home and visited Toys 'R Us and the Mall play area (his choices) in the afternoon. Abram went into work since he'd taken off Friday and Saturday. He is getting a bit more writing/research done before classes start after Labor Day. After dinner, we went to a free concert at Long's Park. We all enjoyed The Infamous Stringdusters' bluegrass, and Owen had fun dancing in the green grass with the little boys sitting next to us.

Uh, yeh, it's been a pretty busy week.