Museum Comes to Life!

We look forward to this event every September.  Our local historical museum staffs the displays with people in period costume and have people demonstrating knitting, weaving, rug making and more inside the museum.  Outside there is traditional dancing, gold panning, musket ball firing, roping, and old timey game playing.  There is something for everyone and the entire event is free.  It is a lovely event even if it is pretty crowded.

The kids love to have their names written in calligraphy.

My kids are the cool kids of hula hooping.

We also had to try a target practice game and a game called hoops and graces.  Don't we all look graceful?

 Everyone needs to know how to properly rope a cow.

There was also the Oscar Meyer weinermobile.  Why wouldn't there be a giant hot dog among all the vintage cars and teepees?  It made perfect sense.  The greatest joy came when they gave us all a whistle for singing the Oscar Meyer weiner song.  Words fail to express the sheer bliss of being followed around by four kids blowing into shrill plastic whistles.  Words fail.

Inside the museum Sam found a new reason for living.  My little guy who can't stay still for anything spent forever gazing at the model trains.  This was shortly before we lost him.  I thought Michael had him.

I was under the impression the boys were all off looking at clocks while the girls and I were talking to some lovely women who were knitting.  Then I heard the P.A. announcement that every parent dreads.  "We have a little boy named Sam at the front desk who is wearing a Bronco's jersey."  I looked at the woman I was talking to and yelped, "I thought his dad had him!" threw Grace up on my hip and started running up front.  I got up there to find a teary little boy and pretty understanding volunteers.  I hugged Sam and we started to walk off when a little girl who was volunteering ran up to us.  She was bringing the sad, lost, little boy a bag of cookies.  She was very sweet and Sam suddenly didn't think getting lost was that bad.  I'm almost afraid that he is going to try it again to see if he can score some more cookies.

He did share his prize with Grace and they rode off into the sunset. No quilts were injured or smeared with cookie crumbs in the taking of this picture.

We then continued our journey.

One of our last stops, and a perennial favorite is the printing press.  We left a bit more educated, a lot more tired, and with many copies of the same page of newsprint.  Hopefully next year we can manage not to lose anyone.  I don't think my heart could handle it again.