Spring Break, Day 3

 

Day Three. We are off to the Tar Pits. We are members of the Natural History Museum, which gets us into this museum as well. We stopped at Target and bought each kid a sketchbook and markers. 

We found a lovely shady area and had a picnic lunch. 

The Page Museum is another one of those LA museums that know how to reach kids. The first thing the kids ask is "how did they get stuck? did they sink like quicksand? why didn't they just pull themselves free?" And the first thing in the museum is an exhibit that has metal poles sunk into a few inches of tar, and you need to grab them and try and pull them up. It's harder than it looks!

 The museum is a square building around a garden. Lucy and Arlo are drawing the skeleton of a giant land sloth. My concept for this break is to take the kids places and make them draw what they see. Oscar lost his sketchbook the minute we walked back in the house, but I'll put in a couple drawings from Arlo's and The Goose's books.

 Here's Arlo's drawing of that skeleton:

 Oscar is drawing a saber-toothed tiger. One thing that you learn right away is that there are no dinosaur bones in the pits. Dinosaurs lived 20 million years ago and the tar pits are 10-30,000 years old. Lots of wolves, cats, and mammoths. No dinosaurs.

We also learned that the animals didn't sink in the tar. They'd get stuck in as little as three inches of the goop and they'd die of attack from predators or dehydration. 

Lucy didn't draw much except for herself, over and over. She's at that awesome developmental stage  where three weeks ago, she was barely making a face -- ie, a circle with two circles in it. Now she's doing bodies and smiles and fingers. 

There were tens of thousands of wolves found in the pit, since they would attack the trapped creatures. The museum illustrates this with a display of 400 jawbones. 

 There's a fishbowl lab were a few paid staffers and many unpaid volunteers sort fossels and clean up bits and pieces. The dig, cleanup and sorting is done largely by volunteers. The dig is still ongoing but they only actively dig in the summer for lack of funding.

 In the central garden.

A saber-toothed tiger attacking a giant land sloth. That's the stuff, right there. And Arlo's version of it:

Arlo would like you to know that the red stuff spurting out is the blood. 

The park, with a couple other museums and many small tar pits, is beautiful.

 Tar on a stick.

 Tar on your fingers.

 Right in the middle of this picture, way in the back, is LACMA and that giant boulder that shut down Los Angeles a couple weeks back.

 Everyone had had a good day, so we stopped on the way home at our local candy shop. Arlo said I was a pretty good mom but I would be the best mom ever if I let them have candy for breakfast.

It's good to have something to aspire to, don't you think?

Finally, here's Arlo's depiction of the gristly, heartbreaking scene in the main tar pit of a parent mammoth stuck while its mate and baby cry from the shore.

They asked me if it was the mama or daddy that got stuck. Of course, I told them it was the daddy. Mamas are much too smart to get stuck in tar. Besides, you just know that the mama is all like, how am I gonna get THAT stain out?