Doktor Kaboom

Yesterday we traveled to Wilkes Barre to see a show about electricity featuring Doktor Kaboom. Here's a video someone took at another one of his shows and posted on YouTube. My favorite part was when he put electricity through some pickles, and they lit up like light bulbs! Nadia's favorite part was when a couple of volunteers put on bubble suits and were running into each other illustrating the concepts of electrons repelling each other, etc. Her only disappointment was that she wasn't picked as a volunteer to come on stage, but there were over 1,000 kids there so the odds were not in her favor! Next we drove to Scranton as I had planned to take the kids to Timmy's Town Center (a children's museum), but it turns out they went out of business last year. I couldn't believe that we were 0-2 in a span of two days with driving 30+ minutes to get to a museum that was closed. The kids asked if there were any other museums in Scranton we could visit. It did my heart good to hear them ask me that. We had already taken them to Steamtown (run by the National Park Service), but we contemplated returning there

because we were 1 minute away from it. Since it was so warm out (although a little wet), I decided to try a large park called Nay Aug Park in Scranton. In the summer the swimming pool is open, but all year round you can enjoy many different walking trails - some by a gorge, playgrounds, etc. There is a large treehouse also.

To break up the drive back, we stopped at the Children's Museum in Bloomsburg on the way to dinner and ice skating lessons. Usually we only go to that museum when they're having a special program. On Wednesday we had attempted to attend a program for homeschoolers about the planet Mars. They do two programs a month for homeschoolers, and they also have others on Saturdays that we often attend, but we won't be going there on Saturdays for the next several months because of basketball and then soccer games.  I also am not planning to take them to the second homeschool hangout this month because I chose a program at R. B. Winter state park for our field trip that

particular day instead. So the time we spent at the museum yesterday is likely the only time we'll be there this month. A new children's museum is opening in Lewisburg (much closer to us) in a couple of months. I already purchased a three year membership. I am hoping they will do nice programs like the one in Bloomsburg, but if not we are in Lewisburg on a far more regular basis than Bloomsburg so I am confident we will make good use of that membership. If the one in Lewisburg doesn't end up offering the kind of programs the one in Bloomsburg does, I think we'll maintain memberships at both museums.

To sum up our day yesterday it went like this - leave the house at 8:30, drive to Wilkes Barre (made two stops en route for things like gas for the van), watch Doktor Kaboom show for 1 hour, drive to Scranton, find out museum is closed, spend an hour at a park, drive part of the way home, spend time at Children's Museum in Bloomsburg, have dinner at Cracker Barrel, drive

30 minutes to Sunbury for ice skating lessons, and drive home. We made one tiny detour on the way home to stop and register Nadia for softball so we didn't actually arrive at home until 7:00 pm. Yes, we are going to give Little League a whirl for the first time ever starting in March. Technically all three could play - tball for Oliver, coach pitch baseball for Ian, and minor league softball for Nadia, but I only signed Nadia up. I offered to let her do gymnastics instead of soccer or softball, but she really wanted to do softball. I have no idea how this is going to play out with her softball season taking place at the same time as Ian and Oliver playing spring soccer. It might be the first and last time we do Little League, but I felt like I had to let her try it once. Hopefully it will be feasible for me to get all three kids to and from their practices and games this spring! All in all we had a great day although it's never my preference to spend that much time in a vehicle. I kept telling myself that the next five days we don't plan to go more than 15 minutes away from our house each day. One upside was that we listened to a lot of the book Island of the Blue Dolphins while we were in the van.

When I first got my DSLR camera I stayed in Automatic mode. I can't remember exactly when I made the switch, but at some point I tried Manual mode and then because I was taking pictures outside at the time and the lighting might change quite a bit from minute to minute (if the sun went behind a cloud or something like that), I switched to using AV (aperture priority) mode, and that's where I've stayed for far too long. I am not saying I'll never use AV mode again, but yesterday at the ice skating rink I discovered two things: #1 I brought the wrong lens (50mm is not a good choice for taking pictures at that location now that I have a full frame camera). I am going to try my 85mm next week. Hopefully that will work better. #2 I could do a better job in manual mode than in AV (the camera was choosing too fast of a shutter speed and my pictures were too dark). Did I nail those photos on the ice skating rink? Nope, but the ones I took in manual were better than the ones I took in AV. I have two more months to practice taking pics of Nadia and Ian's ice skating lessons. :)