Views From a Crow's Nest: A Field Trip to the Durham Museum of Life and Science

Aadit is on Spring break this week, so we decided to take a few field trips to spend time together outside of the monotony of schoolwork that we've become so accustom to this semester. Today's field trip destination: The Museum of Life and Science in Durham. Aadit, being the animal expert that he is, has a membership to said museum and was so excited to show me around. So after a quick lunch, we were on the way.

Aadit already has me all figured out--he knew I'd want to take pictures of our day so he explained all the opportunities for great pictures we'd have throughout the museum, and this picture was an Aadit original and our first stop.

Our first exhibit was the Farm Animals exhibit, where Aadit laughed at my disapproval of the smell. His favorite animals in this part were the sheep and cow.

Next we walked through the butterfly conservatory and Aadit jumped back every time a butterfly floated by too close for comfort. Then, I reluctantly followed him through the insect exhibit and he laughed as I screamed at each creepy, crawling beetle, cockroach, and spider in the (too thin, in my opinion) glass cages. This is when Aadit decided he wanted to take the rest of the animal pictures, and he filled my camera with pictures of bugs for me to "always remember". (He is quite sarcastic for a 9-year-old) For the mental health of everyone reading this (and myself), those bug pictures will not be posted. He did, however, capture a great frog image that he said looks like they are in their natural habitat.

Aadit practically dragged me to the next exhibit--his favorite in the entire museum: Explore the Wild. He was so excited about seeing the American Black Bear that he skipped in front of me the entire way, though I was able to get him to stop for one picture together before venturing on.

He slung my camera around his neck and took pictures of the bears for the next 45 minutes, playing with and laughing at the zoom feature and trying to capture each movement of the five bears we saw. Although I loved watching this little photographer at work, he continually turned around every few pictures and said, "Now I will take just a few more."

Of all the pictures he took, his favorite was one in which he called "the crazy zoom picture," where only the bear's fur is visible. He laughed about that picture the entire day. After seeing the bears, we walked down to the wolf and lemur exhibit, though it was too chilly for either species to be out and about. With one more visit to the bears, and after waving to the cameras which allowed visitors to zoom in on the bears in the exhibit (one of my silly ideas he thought was so funny), we were on our way home.