Saturday, January 19, 2013

Toddler at a Museum

Sounds like a bad movie right? Snakes on a plane, Toddler in a Museum, ahhhh!

Daddy is an artist and a teacher. Because of those things, I expect that out kids will be involved in art somehow (even if it's just to attend an opening or a show to "show your tribe") so I thought it would be good to get them started on attending different things now.

The McNay offered a program a few Sundays ago where there was a talk about cultural artwork and an activity. We showed up late (unintentionally) so we missed the talk but got to peruse the museum and attend the activity (which involved taking old small toys and building a sculpture out of them, hot gluing the sculpture, and taking home a souvenir).

Now this would have been all fine and good except for two things. It started at 1. Nap time starts at 1. Sage slept through most of it, but Silas stayed awake like the trooper he is. Then when we got to the sculpture building part he wanted to go through all the toys (holding up the line) and he just wanted to play with them (not build a sculpture). Whenever Mike tried to help him build, Silas would take the toys back and play with them. Finally we took a tired toddler out to the car and left his toys for another kid to build with (I felt badly taking toys and not building).

Moral of the story: Si's not ready for this sort of stuff yet and I should have known that and not pushed it. He enjoyed sitting in the stroller and checking out the paintings for a bit, so maybe we'll just stick with that for now. We'll stroll, talk about museum etiquette (you can't touch, stay behind this line, etc.), and look at some cool stuff. Maybe in a few years we can go to the activity portions.