Thursday, January 4, 2018

Queens! (Yaaas)

Yesterday we headed up to Queens (my first time, I believe) to visit the Museum of the Moving Image. They were featuring a "Winter Break Recess" of a Lego Batman themed activities but my driving force was the newly opened permanent Jim Henson exhibit.

Ziyan slept through the first hour while the rest of us made superhero costumes and make inspired by Lego Batman. Afterward, Sam helped the kids craft some stop action animation. I had to sit down because ziyan was sleeping in the wrap and that kid is getting heavy! 26 pounds to be exact. We're gonna need a bigger wrap. ;)

Ziyan awoke just in time to start the Jim Henson exhibit. I could have spent all day in there but my kids were less interested. They were appropriately engaged for kids but didn't want to read every placard and study every Muppet sketch or Sesame Street scribbled song list. Zayd loved building his own Muppet and ziyan was drawn to Big Bird, who he calls La La. (One of his favorite books is The Sesame Street Wheels on the Bus in which the bird on the bus songs la la la. So, even though "buh" had long been Ziyan's favorite sound (baba, buhbuh, bawl), he's never even tried to say Big Bird.) He was impressed with Melmo (again his word it sounds almost exactly like Mama). Sam showed the kids the Dark Crystal section, we saw some old commercials, and I loved loved loved everything Muppets. 

Lastly, we headed to the third floor for what I thought would be a short visit to see how Video Games have evolved. Nope. There were two rooms dedicated to video games from their creation up through 1993. Reading "video game arcades popped up all across the country in the 80s and 90s," kind of stuck me. Wait, the stuff from my youth is old stuff... Stuff you memorialize in a museum. They talked about arcades in shopping malls and I had a serious flashback/feeling of decay. Zayd and Sam played about one hundred round of Mortal Kombat while Ziyan hogged the Sega driving game I remember my brother playing. (It was one of the newest machines, dating from 1993, I believe.)  Also, NBA jam. Zahra and I tried our hand at a few things but we were definitely less committed. There was also a cool art installation that featured 30 second clips of over 300 games from the first decade or two of home video game systems. Every thirty seconds the game switched and you had to figure out the controls. It was neat, I thought. Zahra found it frustrating. Though, having never touched a video game, she was at a severe disadvantage.

Otherwise, we visited with Auntie Sonia and made family memories while coloring a very intricate cactus hanging wall art, thing. That's day two in the books!

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