Rhode Island School of Design Musem

A very lofty sounding title, eh?

Annika and I are back from our first "Girls Only" trip. It went pretty well. We dropped Josiah off at school promptly at 9:12 a.m. I can never seem to get him there right at 9:00 a.m. Why? I am the most organized person in the world. I had everything set out and ready to go last night. Anyway, had him there at a little after 9:00, checked in with his teachers and the center director, who all agree that Josiah is definitely ready to start preschool. So for the next two weeks, he will spend some time in the toddler classroom and some time in the preschool classroom. He gets bumped up in about three weeks, when he'll start going part-time for two days per week.

Not to digress (you know I hardly ever do), but I just finished reading a book called "The Power of Play" by some psychiatrist. It was very interesting, about how play for children isn't very spontaneous anymore. It's all organized in classrooms, playgroups, sports. Kids are too hovered over by their parents. The author reminisced about when he was growing up...his parents telling him to "go outside and play" and how he would run wild out of doors for hours on end, building forts and making fires, playing tons of imaginative games. He says that kids aren't allowed to really do that sort of thing anymore. He blames the media for making parents paranoid...for instance, we worry about kidnappings, but he says that there aren't really any more kidnappings than 50 years ago, they blown out of proportion in the media. I don't know, maybe that's true. I have a hard time imagining myself saying "Hey, Josiah, Annika...just go on outside and play all day". Eeek. The best part of reading this book was having the author justify the fact that I mostly sit back and let them play without interfering (aka: slackerism). Yay!!

Hans says he can remember riding bike all over Austin, and I can remember riding my bike out into the country around St. James. I guess we ran around a little bit, maybe to friend's homes or the park. I'm pretty sure that Jan had a handle on where we were at all times. We were well trained to call every 22 minutes to "check in". Strange, but I still do it. Just not every 22 minutes. Maybe, more like every two days.

God. Hans is watching an episode of "CSI" where they found some dude who had been dead for two months, dismembered and stuffed into a duffel bag. It is completely and totally gross and disturbing. Talk about things you don't want your children doing or seeing. Hello, parental controls. If I have nightmares tonight...

Anyway, to get back to the main story here: RISD Museum. A pretty nice little museum. It was fairly quiet, just Annika and me, a few other couples and one large school group of 7th graders. The staff was so friendly and helpful. It is a good collection...I liked the Impressionists the best, of course, and European art from the late 19th/early 20th centuries. I just do NOT get modern art. Jeez, what a waste of space. One "piece" (it was a piece, all right) was a rock with human hair glued to it, titled something like "Mr. Rockhead". I swear, Josiah's artwork looks better and more mature than some of the stuff in the modern wing.

They had a special display of Japanese woodblock prints that I went especially to see...those were wonderful. I'm disgusted that we didn't buy a few more pieces of art in Japan. Oh well. There was also a room of kimono and Japanese pottery that I enjoyed. Annika fared pretty well...she got a little bored around the time we started looking at Egyptian artifacts. I had to feed her pretzels continuously to keep her quiet. She wasn't crying, she just enjoyed the fact that her voice was made very loud and echo-ey in the big, high-ceilinged rooms.

Afterwards, we went to Providence Place and hit the shops, had some lunch, then headed home and picked up Josiah. Now I must start thinking of what we'll do next Wednesday.

RISD Museum gets *** stars out of 5 from MamaD4 and AnniD4.

PS: The museum did not allow photography, so no pictures, sorry!