children are amazing

Children are amazing. Unpredictable. Infinitely more interesting than most adults. “What would you like to do today boys?” A museum! WHAT?!?! I shouldn’t be surprised. These are the boys that insisted we go to the Louvre in Paris (Scott and I weren’t thrilled—we’d been) because they needed to see the real album cover painting of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. That was one of those moments when you realize your kids are cooler than you are and they aren’t even teenagers yet. Ah well.

Today was wonderful. We met friends at my favorite London locale—Borough Market. Drank coffee from Monmouth. Ate our chosen snacks standing up under the central structure since it was ‘chucking down’ rain. More proof that our children our cooler than us? Out of all the options at Borough Caid wanted cucumber and tomato salad with roasted sweet potatoes. Again, WHAT?!?! Then we sat at another coffee shop and visited for a while. The boys explaining their favorite aspects of various European cities. It was one of those I-can’t-believe-we-get-to-live-this-life moments.

Our friends left and the boys weren’t ready to go home. So at their request we walked to the nearest museum, the Tate Modern.

Art museums are amazing places with children. A gigantic steel sculpture is experienced with every sense. It’s brilliant to run underneath. Dark and creepy inside. Makes a fantastic hollow-echo sound when you run on it and should really be classified a climbing structure! I don’t know how the artist or the curators would feel, but I love to watch them assess artwork’s value through all of their sensory grids.

To my boys, what’s outside the windows is just as interesting as what’s inside the frames. They sat beside the Jackson Pollack and just across from Monet’s Water Lilies and sketched St Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge and the Thames outside the window. Bridger’s of course included people and animals. Caid’s was drawn on a grader scale and much more technical.

The sun had come out by the time we left. Blue skies over St Paul’s. We ate bratwurst and looked at daffodils in Southwark Cathedral’s gardens. Then we took the train home. It was one of those magic days. Made all the more interesting and rich and wonderful by the two little men who accompanied Scott and I. Children are amazing.