Today is a big day for Paul. There was a morning meeting followed by a vote which led to the announcement that he will be the editor for an academic journal! I hear that all the ladies and gentlemen will be more friendly to him and that his attractiveness skyrockets with this new title.

Before he got mobbed, we snuck away as a family to get breakfast (Biscuit Bitch) and catch an exhibit at the Seattle Art Musuem.

We saw signs for Beauty and Bounty: American Art in the Age of Exploration way back on our first foray into the city. It seemed a perfect way to end an epic trip of our own exploration.

I love this interactive table - there was a video with all of the patterns that have been made:

Paul & I didn't get to take our time and ponder and discuss and admire and explore during this exhibit. There is no bargaining with kiddos. There are no promises you can make that buy an hour of quiet, controlled, good choices. And as we have repeatedly been surprised by, they do not yet have the capacity for awe and appreciation of the things (beyond "what a cool pinecone and piece of trash I just picked up!") So, we went to the bathroom. Took a 30 minute break at the water fountain. Played at that table. And left quickly.

Paul went back to the conference. We went to the Pacific Science Center (I love reciprocal relationships. Thanks COSI!) I had a few moments (every 20 minutes, to be exact) where I sort of wished that Bear was not potty trained. Or maybe I wished that the Science Center had more bathrooms or maybe I wished they had more bathrooms than zero on the main floor. Or that they were strategically located throughout the entire complex rather than at the lower entrance and in the fountain area.

As I am writing this, I realize that the past few days have been more stressful than I wanted to admit. Let me focus on the pretty and the awesome that we saw:

The Seattle Art Musuem had a collage called "The Blackboard" by Conrad Marca-Relli (1961) that really held my attention through the kids and the rushing and more than anything in the Beauty and Bounty exhibit.

When we travel like we are travelling, we get to a place and start to create little maps in our heads of where we are, what we tried, what we want to remember, the route to take, things to explore and where they fit into the rest of the map. Each little geographical fragment could be one of those pieces in the collage. We get home and the mental map we keep of our trip is very different than anything we find in an atlas. It is a collage of map fragments where the scale and orientation is all wonky. It is that very collage hanging in a room in the Seattle Art Museum on the corner of 2nd and University which is across the street from the light rail station...

I saw my kids working together:

It doesn't come naturally. They are still so protective of their space and things that they touched first. But when Gusty could no longer stack blocks on his tower because it was too high up, he asked "Bar, help me peas?"

Dinosaurs and the love my boys have of dinosaurs:

Butterflies!

I took the boys to lunch and there was beer can chicken on the menu. Yes.

We walked through the streets a little slower which means that Bear was able to ask a tattoo parlor crew on their smoke break for a tattoo, we saw so many taxis and fire hydrants (Bear liked to count them), and I was able to snap photos while we meandered.

And then we were done. We got back to the hotel, I taught myself how to put a bike rack and Paul's bike onto the car, and we checked ourselves into our next home back in the burbs.

Wow there was a lot more good then stressful in there.