Natural History

We've been limiting Mo's screen time lately because she hit her head pretty hard during a seizure the other day, and while the only thing she generally seems to want to do is watch YouTube on her tablet all day, that's contraindicated with a concussion.



Okay, it's contraindicated by having a life, too. But while we generally try to break up the YouTube binges with stickers, painting, outings, etc., I had to redouble my efforts this weekend. And going to a matinee was out because, well, that's screen time, too.



So we went to the Kemper museum pretty recently, so my first thought was we were overdue to visit the Nelson. All that walking would be good therapy for the ankle she broke last fall, but then there's the ingrown toenail (same foot), I just couldn't make her do that much walking. So the Natural History museum in Lawrence. It's not like you don't walk at all, but it's pretty compact and on a Sunday you can park reasonably close.



She doesn't look super elated in these pictures, and there was some whining, no doubt related to that toe. But there was also laughter, and her briskly walking up to things she liked and turning for me to take her picture. She also thought it was funny when, by the Jayhawk sculpture outside the student union, I asked her if the bird was the word. That rhyme really struck a chord with her echolalia and if I said 'The bird,' she'd laugh and sing-song 'is the word!'





They're only open until 4:00 on Sunday these days. They had to cut back hours a bit thanks to Sam Brownback's miscomprehension of math.*



*Supply side economics, like stimulus spending and a lot of other terrible ideas embraced by both left and right is a different thing at the Federal level. States have to balance their budgets, they can't just pretend there are big dividends coming from their bullshit 'investment' in a few years. Brownback's tax policies are the Republican equivalent of Krugman's idiotic calls for massive government spending: it feels good if you can pretend you'll be able to borrow a constantly growing amount of money based on perpetual economic growth. It's not real economics. The only ways an economy grows is by adding population or increasing productivity, and once you've industrialized, you're pretty much left with minimal productivity gains. You can look at Japan's decades malaise to see what America would look like minus all that immigration. It's a good thing Kansas can't just go into the hole instead of coming up with actual revenues to pay for whatever it does, but it's a bad thing when the Governor and a significant number of legislators pretend tax cuts are magic fairy dust.