The blur

I now understand why Chicago has so many wonderful museums. When it's 18 degrees and icy out, what else are you going to do with three stir crazy children? On Sunday, my husband and I bundled up all three kids, and strapped them into the car, after we chipped enough ice off the doors to open them. I blasted the heater, and we headed south to the Museum of Science and Industry. It is housed in a grand old building from the Columbia Exposition of 1896 (for more information about the building, and a wonderful and creepy historical novel, check out The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson). The building was majestic with stately columns and green domes, but what really impressed the kids was the underground parking. Kept at a balmy 40 degrees, I was impressed, too.

We entered at the lower level, and were immediately drawn to the 1934 Pioneer Zephyr Streamlined train. Actually, we were more accurately dragged there by the chatty gentleman in the engineering costume. While we waited in line for the guided tour, we were regaled by his life story.

"You know, I almost moved to San Antonio! I applied for a job at San Antonio College, but I didn't get it." He trailed off dejectedly, looking all the more pitiable in his white train engineers jumpsuit and striped hat. My son nodded blankly.

I warned the woman giving us the tour to brace herself for lots of questions from my son, but he was too engaged in the talking exhibits to utter a word. I marvelled at the feat of engineering and exhibit planning that could keep my son silent for 15 minutes: a talking burro, a train car full of grey passengers chatting back and forth, and images off the passing countryside superimposed on the windows. I'm not sure how much of the substance of the exhibit they absorbed, but the style was engaging enough.

We set off to explore the other exhibits. Many of them were designed as methods of generating creative thinking, like this empty cartoon strip where children were encouraged to star in their own strips. My son enjoyed selecting the dialogue and lining himself up just right. The girls had little patience for it.

The next room we entered was a nautical exhibit, filled with dozens of models of old ships. The children decided that they would have to return with their Papa, an old sea salt, himself.

We visited the Fairy castle, which was an enormous model of a, well, fairy castle, with miniature details of a chapel, complete with stain glass windows, a banquet hall with tapestries and crystal goblets and itty bitty knives and forks, a bedroom with a tiny bear skin rug, and thousands of other small knickknacks that enchanted the crowds of little girls pressing against its glass enclosure. My daughter came out spellbound.

When you're a princess, will you live in a castle like that? I asked her. She just somberly nodded her head. My son rolled his eyes, and complained.

"That was boring."

The baby enjoyed the flat, rectangular hand-held earphones for a narrated tour of the structure she could barely see.

"Allo! Allo!" She called into each "phone".

We stopped for lunch in front of a Rube Goldberg-type contraption made by a Swiss engineer from scrap metal and toys, to celebrate the Swiss tourism industry. The kids watched a golf-sized silver ball ascended and descended, riding on buses, trains, trolleys and a boat, and phones rang, bells tinkled, light illuminated and went dark, in a rhythmical, mesmerizing cadence, back and forth, up and down. So many small contraptions whizzed and twirled, for the dozens of children who would come, stare for ten or fifteen minutes, then be dragged away by their parents.

The day seemed to whiz by in a blur, like a spinning flag on the Swiss Mountainside. We arrived soon after they opened at eleven, and left at the four o'clock closing. For close to five hours my children dreamed about voyages on trains and ships and flying contraptions, played with the many hands-on squirting, scooping, and sorting activities, explored the circus, the power grid, and the household plumbing system, imagined themselves into the Swiss countryside or in a tiny fairy castle, and ran around the cavernous halls. They spent the day in near-constant motion.

That night I smiled looking at the photographs I had taken, half I'd deleted because the kids had spun around as the camera flashed. In all of the pictures I kept, their faces were all blurry. I smiled because that was just the way I remembered it.