A Galaxy Far, Far Away

I love my boys. As much as they can be frustrating at times, they bring me much joy. Beth has been encouraging me to take Anders to the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota for a while (I was dragging my feet because of the cost). Gavin & Lisa & Bronte from Albert City visited today, so Gavin went with us. Anders was so fun to watch--he was so excited during everything. He does have this trouble with having a photographic face when looking at the camera--which is part of his charm.

The exhibit was Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination. They had displays on how modern science is advancing, mimicking things from the movies; there were also hands-on stations where you could do things like build a hovering landspeeder (using maglev technology with legos and magnets) and build & program a robot to move where you wanted it.

We saw a lot of models from the movies (Beth & I had seen some when we were in Chicago at an exhibit at the Field Museum, but there were a lot of new things). It was fun to look at some of the odd little things on the ships, many of which were build from model parts (the Millennium Falcon has a sticker on the outside saying that it is Cummins Powered, for instance).

Anders loved seeing the costumes from the movies, too. He was awed at how big Chewbacca & the other Wookiees are. And he thought it was cool that he was the size of a Jawa. After we got through the exhibit, we checked to see if Anders wanted to see anything again before we left it (you had to have a separate ticket for the displays), so Anders wanted to go back and get his picture taken with almost everything there (you're only seeing a small part of things here).

A highlight was a short film where the 3 of us got to sit in a replica of the Millennium Falcon's cockpit. He was pretty excited by that.

We had an hour left after we finished our lunch to see a few of the other exhibits in the museum. The first stop was the dinosaurs and fossils. That was cool, of course (especially to a 4 year old). I think he'll have a few lasting memories from the trip. For me it was the wide eyes and smile on his face.