Field trip today

Well, sort of. We went to a Mommy and Me event at Santana Row. We've never been there before (bad consumers!) and were lucky to be mis-directed into a parking garage that turned out to be pretty darn close to where we eventually wanted to be.

The reason for this outing was that the kids had seen an advertisement on PBS about a Curious George movie that was going to be showing at the event. I looked around for info and found a bare minimum, but enough to confirm that *something* with Curious George was going on, so we went.

There were probably more than 200 kids under 6 years there, and tables with craft activities (coloring pages and stringing macaroni necklaces) that sat about 50 of them. And you can't really rush the pre-school crowd through crafts that tax their fine motor skills and dexterity. Which meant that we skipped all the craft table activities.

Inside they had live entertainment - Andy Z was there to sing and dance with the kids, and a face painter. We were apparently among the first group to come across the face painter after she opened up, so Sayer got a beautiful design done on the corner of her left eye and across her temple. After that, she went right up to the front of the crowd of kids watching Andy Z and danced around like mad. Duncan hung with me in the back of the crowd.

After that wrapped up we stood in line for 20 minutes before they let us into the theater to get seated for the movie. And the 'movie' turned out to be a 15 minute sneak preview of an hour-long special that will debut on PBS the day before Thanksgiving. A Very Monkey Christmas. It took another 15 minutes or so for everyone to load into the theater, so in that time I was able to explain to the kids that this wouldn't be a whole movie, just the beginning of it, and that we'd have to wait a couple weeks before we saw the rest. They were fine with that :) So we watched 15 minutes of Curious George on the big screen, then hustled out of the theater and back to the car and home. It was noon by then, and I just barely got lunch served before the hunger monster possessed Duncan. Whew!

Nothing remotely educational about the trip. Well, unless you count the conversation we had on the way there about the Netflix movie Sayer and I watched last night ... National Geographic's Birth of Civilization. Two thumbs up on the movie, and the conversation showed that she followed it beautifully :)