How to induce nightmares

We took the kids to see the Mythic Creatures exhibit at the National Maritime Museum, and scared the living daylights out of them. It was advertised as having Dragons, mermaids unicorns and fairies so I thought, cool we have some fans of those in this house and it might inspire this term’s visual arts unit. Only, major problem, to get in you have to walk under the entwined fibreglass tentacles of the giant Kraken. The kids were not impressed!

However we managed to get passed it, Eli even posed for this photo after Lilly ran right up to the thing jumped on its back and called out ‘I’m not scared like you Nah Nah n Nah Nah!!!!”

Lani was pretty much terrified of everything. She hung close to me which helped her a lot and eventually she started to brighten up. I asked her if she was less scared and she told me she was because she had worked out where the noises were coming from. The little clever clogs had been looking behind and above every exhibit until she had worked out all of the sound and lighting special effects. After she had done that and a quickly double checked with me that Australia doesn’t have any of these ones running around the streets she was fine.

Eli and the dragon

A huge Chinese dragon hung over our heads

Lilly with a “Big Foot” jaw. The exhibition showed children how people may have confused fossils and skeletal remains of extinct creatures and observations of everyday creatures with supernatural spirit realm creatures, blah, does that make any sense? Basically PAST PEOPLE thought that the Giant Gorilla jaw bone belonged to a Big Foot and that the muddled up skeleton of a triceratops was visualised as the griffon. I personally thought it was a bit depressing to destroy the magic but Lani found the explanations the most exciting part I so have a Temperance Brennan on my hands.

All in all it was a good day and the kids did enjoy themselves. There was heaps of creatures from all over the world and tones of information on them, we learnt a lot and best of all it was FREE!!