At the museum

So we decided to blow of E's Saturday morning class. We've been doing this a lot lately, mostly because we hate it. We made the mistake of enrolling her in a 12 week (pretty expensive) baby music-n-fun class. It's a franchise of one of the cute baby clothes stores. Faulty reasoning led me to suppose cute clothes = cute baby class. So wrong, so wrong, so wrong.

First off, there's the teacher. Think if Otto the busdriver mated with a crazy drunk sorority girl. One would guess that if you were to be singing for a group of 1 year olds you would lay off the cigarettes and bourbon the night before. Or, if your job required you to walk around in socks, you would be sure to wear ones without giant holes in the toes. Not our girl. I'm not sure if she's too hungover to remember the words, but each song has only one verse and they're all sung to the tune, "The Wheels on the Bus."

Then there's the busy boxes. They bring these out, filled with toys, for about 2 minutes. Don't worry if your child gets attached to one, you can purchase them by the door on your way out! It's such an obvious plug to buy their crap it makes me ill.

The real kicker is that they try to justify each activity with an educational spin. "Now we are working on our communication skills! Toddlers are developmentally at the stage that they need to..." Blah blah blah shut up Boozy! Really? Let's talk child development then. Can you please, oh please explain how bouncing on an air log helps my daughter with her communication skills? Can't we just let em bounce???? For bouncings' sake?????

Anyhow, we ended up touring the Children's Museum at Navy Pier. Quite cool. They have a whole Blue Man Group exhibit about making music, pitch, tension, etc. She had a blast going through the lighted tunnels, the blacklight room & playing the PVC pipes. She probably learned and enjoyed herself more in our one trip than she has in our 10 other sessions of class. I know I did!