like an old friend

being home for three weeks in a row has its advantages. Despite it being the holiday season, when we have twice as much to accomplish, I’ve been able to keep up with all the tasks and even get ahead a bit! I had promised the girls that when things were under control, we would start revisiting our old haunts. And this Thursday, we made it to one of Camille’s old favorites, the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.

When we turned onto the entrance road, the girls were wowed by the transformation of the old “reflecting pool”, which has been refashioned into a proper fountain, complete with dinosaurs! The re-dressing has turned the front of the museum from boring to interesting, to say the least. As I filled out the paperwork to re-join (they still had our old address), the girls explored the foyer and read about the fossils in the floor’s tiles.

Chloe seemed to have vague memories of the various areas; Camille knew exactly where everything was. After a brief visit to the Gold exhibit, we found seats in the IMAX for the Van Gogh film. Finding seats wasn’t difficult; there were only about eight other people in the theater. Homeschooling sure does have some nice perks! The film was a bit disappointing for me; I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but the film did not live up to my expectations.

After the movie, the girls “Walked through Georgia”. The final room in the walk always struck me as wasted space, but a much better ending has been added. The girls spent the most time in “Sensing Nature”. While that room is basically the same, some of the interactive exhibits have been updated, making the experiments easier to understand. The girls, as always, loved the bubbles. The camera in the green screen area was pointed so high that Chloe couldn’t be seen. She wasn’t impressed.

While Fernbank doesn’t hold a candle to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in DC or the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, it is a great place for us to head on a rainy day in Atlanta…