Toddlers or Teenagers--Pick your Poison.

Spring break is finally here!  And what do I do?  Send it surrounded by thousands of OTHER screaming children.  The difference is that these children were much smaller and--that's the only difference I can really think of.  Both toddlers and teenagers smell, are uncoordinated, get angry for no reason and yet are strangely adorable.  (Yes, yes, I know most of you are saying that teenagers are decidedly not adorable, but I beg to disagree.  I am also being generous by describing toddlers as "adorable."  See, this is why I teach high school).

You see, Tuesday I finally made good on my promise to accompany my friend Shari and her daughter to the Seattle Children's Museum.  I'm pretty sure I made this promise when Suzannah was an only child, but it's been so long that Isaac, the World's Largest Three Month Old, came along for the ride too.  See, if you don't follow-through on your promises to children, they multiply!!!

For those of you not in the know, the Children's Museum is located in the Seattle Center House at Seattle Center.  Seattle Center is pretty much a conglomeration of the land and buildings around the Space Needle left over from the '62 World's Fair (heeey, did you know my grandpa worked on the Space Nee--woops, sorry, another time).  Everyone spends a lot of time arguing about what to do with Seattle Center and Center House, which is basically a big food court as far as 90% of the visitors to Seattle Center are concerned.  Nobody can agree what to do with it so they spend lots of money drawing pretty renderings of what could be.  One industry that will always make money in Seattle: Drawing plans of what we could maybe someday do in the future.

Anyhow... we used to go to the Children's Museum back in the day, when I was a kid.  They did this big lavish remodel and put in a mountain (seriously.  A mountain) a few--well, 16--years back and I as really excited to check it all out.  I wanted to bring my new, fancy camera on this little outing.  I imagined myself taking artistic and beautiful pictures of Suzannah that would document this time in her life.  BUT I am also not an idiot.  I know that wrangling an almost-four year old requires both hands and my full attention, and so do my amateur photography skills.  In the interest of not misplacing Shari's firstborn I settled for using the camera on my phone instead.  Problem--it has major shudder lag issues.  Major.  Made more major by the fact that--oh!  There's another difference between toddlers and teenagers!--toddlers move really freakin' fast.

Also: It is creepy and possibly illegal to post pictures of other people's small children.  So you're missing all the good stuff.  Sorry.  Use your imaginations.

Look what they added after I was too old to go to the museum!

A mini-Kobe, Japan!  There's also a mini-Ghana and mini-Philippines.  They are SO cool looking and made me want to travel.  Too bad this wasn't here when I was a kid or I could blame my wanderlust on the museum.

Each diorama (??) had a little home and store from that country, complete with plastic food appropriate for the country.  The kitchens and food were a big hit.  Here's your run-of-the-mill plastic food soup.  Suzannah added an ice cube tray after the picture to finish it up, then pronounced it "yummy."

Plastic Filipino roll?  Yes please!

This picture pretty much sums up my day spent with a toddler:

Zoom!  Too quick for the camera!

"Okay, okay, cut it out!"