Of the two days we spent in North Carolina visiting my sister-in-law and her family, one of them happened to be Dana’s birthday. I’ve been promising to write more about that day for almost a month now, and by golly I’m not going to flake on that promise. I feel like I’ve been flaking on a lot of things lately, or at least being much slower in getting them done than I’d like. I told myself I can’t watch Glee tonight till I write this post. As rewards go it’s a small one, but it’ll work for me. So here we go!

Since the last time we visited them, Dana & Paul had moved. Their new house is sort of out in the country but still within easy driving distance of the city. They have a big front yard and a huge back yard perfect for two boys with lots of energy.

Their neighborhood has plenty of tall trees and they even have a front porch perfect for sitting on while sipping a cool drink. Not that they’re doing a lot of lounging on the porch these days, what with those energetic boys around to keep up with, but someday they might lounge there!

For now most of their yard time is spent in the backyard. They climb and swing and slide on the play structure, splash in one of the pools, explore the yard, or blow bubbles on the deck.

Heck, they blow bubbles in the living room too. That’s just how they roll. And why not, bubbles are fun!

Brett was still recovering from being sick earlier in the week, and we were trying to keep Annalie from getting sick. We figured getting out of the house was a good idea, so Brett stayed home with his dad while Dana and I took Leo and Annalie to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The largest museum of its kind in the southeastern U.S., it’s also totally free!

Well, the permanent exhibits are free. The rotating special exhibits charge a not-cheap entrance fee, which is the only reason we didn’t go to Chocolate: The Exhibition. I did a high-school term paper on chocolate once for English class (the teacher told us we could pick any subject we liked, and that we should pick something we were interested in), so I was rather disappointed I couldn’t compare what I remembered from my paper to the museum’s exhibit. We did go into Chocolate: The Gift Shop though, and bought some treats. That helped me forget my disappointment.

There’s a really cool butterfly garden at the museum, a recreated dry tropical forest filled with different kinds of butterflies and snakes and even a three-toed sloth. The sloth and the snakes aren’t roaming freely, but the butterflies are. They flit around from tree to feeding station. I guess they occasionally land on a visitor’s head or shoulder, and when Annalie heard that she got all excited. She was actually walking through the conservatory calling out, “Here, butterflies! I have a head for you to land on!” Sadly, none of them took her up on the invitation, but it didn’t faze her.

She was too busy hollering at us to c’mon, hurry up, let’s see what’s next! That girl rarely meanders when a full-on gallop is possible. Leo was more sedate and didn’t rush, so we spent the afternoon encouraging one kid to slow down and another kid to maybe move along a bit faster.

(It reminded me of when we used to take walks around our neighborhood in Maryland with our friend Angela and her girls Gabby and Annie. Annalie was always rocketing ahead of the moms pulling Annie in the wagon, and Gabby would be a block behind us, moseying along in her dreamy way. Ang and I used to laugh because we were barely walking together, it was more like running a relay. I’d run ahead and wait with Annalie at the corner for Ang and her girls to catch up, we’d cross the street, and Annalie would be off again. Good times.)

One thing on which Annalie and Leo do agree is that loud noises in enclosed spaces are not cool. They both really liked this dinosaur exhibit with an Acrocanthosaurus skeleton and models of some pterosaurs and some kind of sauropod, but the minute it got noisy, they were both ready to leave. Dana and I thought it was funny that both cousins are so sensitive to noise. I guess it’s not that strange. Many kids don’t like loud noises. But that day it was funny because they both froze and clapped their hands over their ears at exactly the same time, almost like they’d rehearsed it. So we said good-bye to the dinos and decided it was time to head back outside and wander down the street to Capitol Square.

I have a thing for state capitol buildings. Whenever I happen to be in a capital city I try to visit the building that houses the state government (although we lived in Tempe for two years and, ridiculously, never managed to visit the capitol in Phoenix all of ten minutes from our house). When I was a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I often walked the mile from campus to the capitol building. I’d take the elevator up to the viewing deck in the tower so I could look out over the city. That was my thinking spot. And I loved strolling around the hallways of that beautiful building, hearing my footsteps echo and admiring the murals and gardens, knowing that as a taxpayer and a citizen of Nebraska it was my capitol, that I had just as much of a right to be there as any senator or legislative aide.

All of that to say, if I’m two blocks away from a state capitol building, you bet your sweet bippy I’m gonna want to at least go take a look at it.

We mostly just explored the grounds around the building, since neither of us really had any interest in dragging two hot, tired preschoolers into a government building just then. Luckily there are a bunch of cannons (from various wars, I guess) scattered around the place, perfect for climbing on.

And dangling from. And jumping off of. And sitting on.

Annalie thought so, at least. Leo had no interest in climbing on the cannons, thank you very much. He kept telling Annalie, “No climbing!” because we had just been at the museum where he’d been reminded several times not to climb on certain exhibits. Dana and I didn’t see any signs telling us to stay off the cannons, and we did see a couple of keep-off-the-grass signs, so we figured they’d have told us if they wanted us to stay off the cannons. We assured Leo it was okay if he wanted to climb, but he stuck to hovering nearby and looking on skeptically as Annalie monkeyed around.

Leo chose instead to do a little alfresco interpretive dance for us. We all enjoyed that.

One thing that Dana and I both found interesting and a little odd was that there are monuments and memorials to Confederate soldiers scattered all around the square. (This probably deserves a post in its own right, but let’s face it, this thing is already monstrously long so I’m just gonna address it here.)

Dana and I are both Nebraska natives, and though we’ve both lived in the South and the Southwest, we’re still very much Midwesterners. Perhaps because we grew up in a state that was on the “winning” side of the War Between the States, we both found the Confederate memorials a bit jarring. I know there was more to the Civil War than ending slavery; I know many people insist that keeping the Confederate spirit alive is about Southern pride, not racism. And I guess you could honor the spirit of patriotism that led those men to fight to defend their homes and loved ones, if not the reason the war was waged in the first place. An argument could even be made for leaving those monuments up as a reminder to us to never let something like that happen again, I suppose.

But I don’t get it. To me this is akin to Germany leaving up statues to honor the “brave Nazi soldiers” who fought in WWII. Any Southerners out there care to weigh in? I’m willing to admit I don’t necessarily have all the facts or all the background. I’m open to new thoughts here.

Edited to add: Lynn’s comment made me think about this, and I decided that comparing Confederate soldiers to Nazis is unfair….More in the comments.

Anyhoo. Leaving such weighty matters behind, we grabbed a quick drink of water from this cool old drinking fountain.

I wish I’d thought to look for a year on it somewhere. I love it when stuff like this lasts for a long time, like a signpost pointing to an era when things were made to last. Any guesses how old this is? I think it must be close to 100 years old, but I’m certainly no expert. It might be a clever replica of an antique that was installed two years ago, for all I know.

Back at Dana and Paul’s house, we ordered pizza for dinner and ate some of our museum chocolate for dessert. The kids played happily for a while longer, and then it was time for us to head back to our hotel so Annalie could ditch her lifejacket and learn how to swim in the hotel pool.

Thanks for spending your birthday with us, Dana! We hope you had as much fun as we did.

Whew! I finally wrote about our super-fun day in North Carolina! *cue the streams of light from heaven and the angels singing*