Fun Day in Minneapolis

Today after Church we decided we wanted to go to a museum of some sort and spend the day together as a family. I have this book I bought when Emma was little called "Exploring the Twin Cities with Children". We look through every once in a while to get ideas and today I wanted to go to the Bakken Museum but it was not open on Sundays.. so we'll have to catch it another time. Darin looked up other museums and discovered the Weisman Art Museum on the U of M campus.
The museum was small which was great for Katelyn who has a shorter attention span. There was a neat mixture of photography and paintings. The kids favorite was a the Petterman Apartments which is an interactive art piece. Its basically a apartment hall way. Emma figured out after standing in the hallway if you put your ear to the door you can hear voices inside. In one room was a person listening to baseball game, in another was a person laughing and another was a family eating dinner. The peice even had the smells of musty carpet and cigarretes reminscent of the era.

My favorite exhibit was the Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power who is a photographer mainly portrait style of the post 911 homeland security training and readiness.

A painting liked by all of us was a wall sized painting of thousands of chickens each in their own cages stacked up on opposite walls. We figured out that no two were the same and that if you stood as close to it as you could you felt like you were inside the painting and their were chicken cages all around you.

Overall we had a good time. It was nice to experience the museum with the girls. They are getting old enough now where we can do these kind of excursions and all of us enjoy it. I could tell Emma liked it, she would remember her own art work and compare them. She would also talk about the different brush strokes... I'm always amazed and appreciate how much they learn at school and the benifits of the Art Magnet school they both attend.

After the museum we walked around a little of the campus which was on the bank of the Mississippi River and very close to the 35W bridge that collapsed. We saw a clearing on the other side of the river where there were green scraps of metal layed out on the ground. We realized that this was where they layed out the remains of the bridge..probably trying to figure out what happened. It was amazing how small the pieces looked and that they were once a massive bridge.

Once we left the museum we drove through campus some more and ran into the building where Darin hopes to attend graduate school this fall, Carlson School of Management The kids enjoyed seeing the buildings and invisioning their daddy carrying a backpack and working on homework there! haha

Finally we stopped for a late lunch at the historical Grandma's Saloon. I had a yummy Monte Crisco and the girls talked their dad into a chocolate truffle for desert!

Thats about it for our day in the big city. Even tho we can't wait for spring to arrive it was nice to take the time and to live close enough to enjoy these things with our family.