Leonardo DaVinci, The Great Observer

Part of our trip to Grandma's this past weekend was to catch the DaVinci exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. The timing could not have been better. Nature Girl just finished reading a book about his life. And, he was one of the first artist we ever studied in school, so, she was also familiar with some of his paintings. But, he was SO much more than a famous painter. In fact, the majority of the exhibit was the replication of many of his inventions from his famous notebooks. Of course, there was a whole room dedicated to the Mona Lisa and a video presentation on the Vitruvian Man as well.

It was really, really interesting. I might have stayed there a little bit longer but, we were on our way out of town. And daddy had the other 3 at the mall across the street!

What I thought I would do for this post (and for school ;) is have Nature Girl tell, in her own words, her thoughts on the whole experience. As an added bonus, we were able to visit a butterfly habitat, which I will have her comment on as well.

Nature Girl on the DaVinci Exhibit: The Mona Lisa was one of my favorite exhibits. It showed a lot of pictures of her mouth, her eyes, her face, her head, her hands. I wondered why it was like that but then my mom told me and I understood. They didn't actually know how the Mona Lisa looked because someone had thrown a rock and spilled something like acid on it. (A big part of the exhibit was how the Mona Lisa doesn't look now like it did some 500 years ago because of the aging of the paint, the attempts to restore and the fact that there were two separate incidents of vandalism to the original painting.)

And then there was an exhibit I could touch. I had fun with that. One of my favorite ones that I could touch was one that you spin a handle and it was a circle except there was one flat part and when the pole hit the flat part a metal hammer would fall down and hit a metal block.

And there was one thing that I couldn't touch and I wanted to. It was sort of like a helicopter except you had four men spin four wooden handles and it would lift up in the air. But, I didn't think that would work.

And then there was a video that showed parts of a body which I thought was disgusting. It showed how you walked and how your muscles moved. It showed three parts of your head, the forehead, the eyes and the nose and the mouth. It was pretty weird. I thought it was the first aid guy on a first aid box that my dad has. (The Vitruvian Man video presentation :)

And there was this really cool town that was called The Ideal City. It had three bridges and I saw one that looked like it had been touched on the non-touched exhibit because it was knocked down. It was pretty cool. It had buildings that had lots of windows. But there was no little figurines which was disappointing.

And there was a really cool butterfly exhibit that I loved. It had Monarchs, American Ladies, and a Giant Swallow Tail and pretty flowers. Purple ones, pink ones, white ones that I took lots of pictures of.

The observations, thoughts and words of a 9 year old . . .