Staycation 2011, Entry Five

We headed to Dallas today for our staycation adventure, hitting three museums in Fair Park -- the Museum of Nature & Science, the Children's Aquarium, and the African-American Museum.

The motivation for the trip was the Chinasaurs exhibit at the Nature & Science museum.  It focused on newly-discovered dinosaurs from China, but it was mostly dinosaurs, not China.  The girls liked looking at the provinces the dinos were from, and there was a short video opining that the Chinese dragon myth came from fossils of dinosaurs.  Those were the only touches of China there.  Still, it's a nice exhibit for the dinosaur lovers out there.

There were other fun parts of the museum:

Oh, and for any China adoptive parents who got stuck in the SARS outbreak slowdown, I snapped this in the DNA exhibit, which used the SARS virus to illustrate DNA matching:

Then on to the Children's Aquarium.  The highlight was the outside stingray lagoon, where the girls had the opportunity to touch the stingrays.  They were excited to see more sharks than we did in our recent visit to the Sea Life Aquarium in Grapevine.

And just like the drama of the dinosaur picture above, where they played scared, they had to act out another drama -- Zoe captured by an octopus with Maya coming to the rescue!

The last stop turned out to be my favorite, and the girls actually liked it, too.  There was GREAT artwork at the African-American Museum.  Lots of mixed media and fabric art, including this gorgeous quilt/wall hanging:

This piece was an homage to the artist's mother's garden, and there were gaps in the quilt with notes and photos and ephemera tucked in -- very cool!  Zoe named it her favorite thing in the museum.

There was also a great exhibit about Dallas' Freedman's Cemetery, very interesting.  Zoe in particular liked to listen to the interview videos of older African-Americans talking about what it was like living in Dallas during the Jim Crow era.

Whew, we were worn out after all of that, though with our Fair Park Passports, we still have lots more museums to see and 90 days to do it!