What-What?! Week of March 31st

Yesterday, we headed out to Ballard to the Nordic Heritage Museum to see The Vikings Begin exhibit, and also to see the viking reenactors for their special "Vikings in the Gallery" event.  There was a ton of good stuff to see!

This is a reproduction of one of the helmets in the exhibit -- pretty cool because you could actually touch it!

A little traveling scale with weights

This is something I hadn't seen before in the context of vikings -- silk embroidered with silver.  This fabric would have originally been a bright red.

The helmet that the above reproduction is based on.  There's a good portion of the helmet that's been worn away, but what makes that cool is you can see the construction -- there's a frame structure that's been covered with a roughly woven fabric, and then over that covered with leather and metal.

Visiting the BIG boat.

The boys had a good time with the reproduction scale out in the hallway.

After our time at the museum, we headed out to walk around Ballard; we've spent relatively little time in Seattle since we moved up here, so we thought it'd be fun just to walk around and see what there was to see.  You know what we found?  An arcade!  That's also an ice cream shop (it also has beer, but we didn't try any of that).  This is a good, good combo.

We tried the huckleberry chip, cherry almond chip, salted caramel and the maple walnut flavors.  While they were all good, the salted caramel and the huckleberry chip were the best.

This place had pretty much perfect arcade atmosphere -- slightly grungy, kinda cramped, a bit loud, some weird art on the walls, and the lady at the front had blue hair and sparkly platform boots.  We've been to a few arcades in the area, but haven't been very happy with the mix of games; this location had a bunch of pinball machines, but also fighting games, racing, etc.  Also a Pac-Man table, which Oz and I played several rounds of.

When you play multiplayer Pac-Man, you can also eat the other Pac-Mans... I kept getting the title for this, though Oz was the one winning the most rounds overall.

Saffron playing Crazy Taxi -- she spent a lot of time reversing through the city streets, which was hilarious as the game has no way to look behind you while you do this.  Many things were run over.

Needless to say, my kids are already begging us to go back.

What-What?! Week of September 25th

My parents are visiting, and we have been busy!  I have a million, billion pictures -- too many to post today.  Probably going to post some today, and more next week.

Nordic Heritage Museum

Take a nice picture of the kids?  Never!

Thursday, we headed to the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle.  I'd been interested in going for a while now, and it was pretty cool.  There was tons ant tons of stuff to look at, and I feel like we could go back a few times still and see new things.

There were lots of boats, of course.

And a whole lot of vignettes of various stores, barns, and houses, showing how people lived.

Sprinkled through, there were items for the kids to look at and play with.

"Big Jake" the policeman, and a news article about him, showing his size in relation to a regular-sized woman.

The logging area.

Playing with a Dala Horse.

The top floor had a Lego display with renditions of various myths and historical scenes.

Corwin, being a troll.

Playing with Legos at the museum.  This kept him busy for quite a while.

I will post more pictures next week...