Museum Fun with Pirates

My kids are in the midst of their Spring Break, which for me is Spring Over Time with all of them at home and constantly fighting. There are moments of peace and happiness, but mostly one of them is telling me about some horrible thing one of the other ones is doing. Nina is our best tattler (of course as the youngest it is in her job description). Her information is never self-incriminating and almost always exciting or startling. This morning is was, "Mommy, Sophie BIT Ben!" Awesome. First, I told Sophie that that is disgusting and she might want to think about where Ben's hands have been before biting his finger. Then, I told her that biting was completely unacceptable behavior. It was my first point that made her say "Oh yeah, GROSS!" Problem solved. And we are only 2 days into this whole break thing...

So. We decided it might be better to get out of the house today. We went to The Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Adrian took the day off so we had a whole day of family museum fun, with some Blue Bell ice cream from Russell Stover thrown in afterward. We spent about 3 hours looking at all the regular exhibits in the museum (which was great) and then went to the National Geographic Real Pirates Exhibit. It was super interesting. Nina got a little bored, but the rest of us had a great time.

The exhibit is about the sunken pirate ship, The Whydah, which was recently discovered in the waters near Cape Cod. Massive amounts of pirate artifacts and treasure was also found in the ship wreck. The Whydah was a slave trade ship that was taken over by pirates and then became an infamous pirate ship. This ship was as big as Black Beard's ship. Pretty cool. It was interesting to find out that the sailors /pirates on pirate ships were up to 60% black and often there were also Native American and South American Indian pirates. Did you know that?? They also shared the spoils of their conquests /plunderings evenly amongst the sailors. Who would have thought pirates divided booty up fairly and kept record of it. Of course they murdered and pillaged, so I'm not trying to say the pirate life was lovely, but it was interesting to find out about "the pirate code". In the middle of the exhibit you got to go aboard a replica of the Whydah which was really neat. It felt like I was walking around on one of the ships from The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. And it was also neat how you loosely follow the real-life stories of 4 of the pirates on the Whydah, finding out what their job was on the ship and what happened to them in the end. One of the pirates, John King, was only 8 or 9 years old. The kids also got to try their hand at tying knots and raising jolly rogers. Did you know the jolly roger was raised when one of the crew members died? It was all the interesting pirate tidbits that made the exhibit fascinating.

That was probably way too much information, but really it was a very neat exhibit and I'm glad we went. The kids had a good time and hopefully they will remember today as our fun Spring Break day so the pressure will be off for me to makes things fun for the rest of the week.:) After the exhibit we went to the 4th floor of the museum to see its fantastic view of Denver. It was panoramic with the mountains in the back. Beautiful! And then we had ice cream on the way home. It was a lovely family day. So however the rest of this Spring Break goes at least we'll always have The Museum Day.