My friends and I took our enthusiastic preschoolers out on a field trip to San Francisco to visit the Academy of Sciences, an interactive museum with its own rain forest, aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum, and so much more including world-class scientists, many educational touch screens, and about 40,000 various animals from all over the world. I brought James with me this time alongside Charlton, since I took the older ones last year.
We parked near the museum, by the National AIDS Memorial Grove, a park dedicated to the victims of AIDS and others who have been touched by this disease in one way or another. There are tens of gardens and parks in just this area by the Academy of Sciences and de Young Museum, the Japanese Garden being the most prominent. However, the AIDS Memorial Grove is the only park that has been and continues to be maintained by hundreds of volunteers each month, partnered with private corporations and other philanthropic organizations, with no governmental funds.
To me the memorial brought thoughts of gratitude for the tolerance and love that is still found today in the world. It is not an easy task to overlook how this disease was passed around, especially in San Francisco where the gay community is pronounced in big numbers. It is even harder to not judge when such preferance is made and they result in devastating aftermath for the ones who made those choices as well as for the society that those choices were affecting. The memorial also made me feel pain, without pity, for those kinds of decisions. It truly made me feel gratitude for having the gospel in my life, because even though I don't make those kinds of choices when it comes to my sexuality and morality, the natural women in me tries to come out at times and gear me toward life choices that without the gospel might be hard, staying at home with my kids being one of them. We all have the light of Christ inside us, but if we don't know how to cultivate it, we won't be able to keep it for long.
As I was holding my boys' hands and strolling through this pretty park, I felt so happy to have Jesus in my life, because His example shines when it comes to loving all and judging none. But it also helps me to be more fervent in my responsibility to teach the gospel. It is not my job to judge, but it is my charge and blessing to love all and share the gospel with each of my Heavenly Father's children. I appreciate memorials; they make me ponder. I hope pondering makes me a better person.
When we got to the museum, we met with friends and the boys started looking at the various exhibitions. We started with the natural history museum, where they have included live African little penguins which made Charlton very happy. They were being fed little fish during the time of our arrival and Charlton kept telling the penguins where the fish was located. It was very adorable.
Next was the Rain Forest with its many birds, butterflies, insects and various other animals found in all the levels of this kind of habitat. This is my favorite part of the museum since there are plenty of exotic creatures to be seen, from good-looking sea urchins to warty toads to noble macaws to graciously dangerous snakes to insect eating plants, finishing with stunningly colorful butterflies and birds.
After enjoying the pretty butterflies, located in the highest level of the Rain Forest, we took the elevator straight down to the aquarium. This aquarium is not as big as the one in Monterrey, but boy do I love it. It is just the right space for my children to enjoy looking and learning about many marine creatures. We got to see a diver feeding the animals in one of the aquariums, and that was fun for the kids who kept waving at the diver, who in return waved back. The kids enjoyed looking at the various fish and worked hard to find the ones on their educational flyers. They then proceeded to the marine corner where they learned about the sea animals' habits and life cycle, and of course where they were able to touch some of them.
While the boys were looking and '"I spying," I took the opportunity to take some fun shots of a few of our marine world's prettiest creatures, my favorite this time being the sea dragons and seahorses. While looking at the pictures, here are also some fun facts about a few of them:
There is no clear distinction
between toads and frogs; it’s just that the skin of a toad is rougher and drier
than that of a frog. Toads also tend to be covered with warts.
Toads use their eyeballs to help
swallow their prey. When threatened,
the horned toad shoots blood from its eyes.
A group of toads is often referred to as a knot of toads.
Like many parrot species, macaws
must be DNA sexed to tell the males from the females. They are monomorphic
birds, meaning that the sexes appear the same. Macaws mate for life and use the
same nesting area year after year.
The Green Tree Python is 7 feet
in length and lives in the leaves of the high forest branches. It waits for the
prey and strikes out as the birds fly by.
Pythons eat wild animals, such as such as lizards, caiman, monkeys and
antelope etc. When the heart of the prey stops, they swallow it whole. Except
for the fur or feather, the entire animal is digested in the stomach of a
python.
The larger the meal, the longer
a python takes to digest. It takes weeks and sometimes even months for a python
to digest the ingested animal. A python usually eats only 4 to 5 times in a
year.
When jellyfish swim in large
groups, it is known as a bloom. There are around four hundred dead zone areas
in the oceans of the world where only jellyfish can survive and no other life
form. The growth of a jelly fish NEVER stops. More people are killed by
jellyfish each year than by sharks. Rainy season decreases jellyfish population
because jellyfish can only survive in salty water.
Could sea urchins have discovered the fountain of youth?
They are among the longest living animals on earth. They can live and reproduce
for two hundred years or more.
If a starfish is chopped into pieces, each piece can grow a
whole new starfish. Starfish do not have brains. Starfish’s body has no blood.
Starfish are not completely blind, even though they do not have eyes. Starfish
sense light and shapes through an eyespot (an organ sensitive to light) located
at the tip of their arms.
Butterflies can see red, green,
and yellow. Representations of butterflies are seen in Egyptian frescoes at
Thebes, which are 3,500 years old. The top butterfly flight speed is 12 miles per
hour. Some moths can fly 25 miles per hour! Many butterflies can taste with
their feet to find out whether the leaf they sit on is good to lay eggs on to
be their caterpillars' food or not. Butterflies are cold-blooded and will not
fly if the temperature is below 50 degrees. You will not hurt a butterfly if
you touch it, although you might rub off some of the color of its wings which
are actually miniature scales.
Don’t be
fooled by the delicate appearance of the sea dragon. It is covered in hard
plates and has sharp spines. The male sea dragon has a brood patch on his tail
on which he incubates fertilized eggs for 4–6 weeks. To eat, this creature
sucks plankton and tiny crustaceans into its tube-like snout.
After exploring every corner of the aquarium, we headed up and ate some lunch, after which the little kids wanted to have some free time. I left Charlton with my friends at the toddler play area where they pretend diving and explored being scientists, and took James and his friend Harrison to the planetarium, where we watched a show about earthquakes and got to experience seeing the earthquake from above the earth and inside its core. It was an amazing show and feeling.
After the show, I took the older boys up on the living roof of the museum where they have it covered with various California plants. This green rooftop keeps the building's interior an average of 10 degrees cooler than a standard roof would. The plants also transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, capture rainwater, and reduce energy needs for heating and cooling. The rainwater is used to water gardens and parks all over San Francisco. The living green roof serves also as a habitat for various indigenous insects and birds. It's initially very expensive to build one of these (that's why it isn't as wide spread as the common sense dictates), but afterwards it requires little maintenance. Who wouldn't want plants and butterflies to coexist on top of your home's roof?!
Wow! This post has gone beyond long. I need to start writing more regularly. I didn't think I had so much to say. Anyways, to close this interesting ramble of mine, let me post a picture I took as I was waiting on line to enter the Planetarium. It just says all I wanted to say in this post in fewer words. Have a great day, and enjoy this beautiful life God has given us.
