Tar Pits Museum

Ugh, you guys, I am so sick.  It is just a sore throat and runny nose, but I feel so awful, and also barely slept last night.  Also, the last couple of days, Violet has had a runny nose and been really whiny.  If she felt as bad as I do right now, she is a trooper!  She didn't behave nearly as badly as I have today.

Anyway, I knew it was going to feel like a long morning no matter what, so today Violet and I tried out a new museum we'd never been to before!  I just wanted to do something that would keep her very entertained, so I wouldn't have to talk.  Talking hurts so much.

Our membership to the Natural History Museum also works for the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits.  The park around the museum is really cool, and the tar pits are still there, though fenced in.  We didn't spend much time in the park, but next time I'm going to plan on it.  The inside of the museum was small, but entertaining.  The Natural History Museum, where we go regularly, has mostly dinosaur fossils, with one exhibit of extinct mammals.  This museum is almost completely fossils of extinct mammals, and I though it was so interesting to see the fossils and read about them.   One of the first exhibits we looked at was this one of a saber-toothed cat attacking a ground sloth.  The animals were robotic, so they moved a little bit, which terrified Violet!

This was the best picture I could get because Violet was so scared!  One of the workers assured Violet that those two had been locked in combat for decades and probably wouldn't even notice her, but it didn't help.

There was a robotic wooly mammoth just past the real bones of the mammoth, and Violet was pretty scared of that too.  I did manage to get a picture of just her with the mammoth skeleton.  That skeleton was pretty impressive in real life!

Of course we had to stop in the gift shop for a while, where Violet insisted on holding all of the pink stuffed animals in the whole place.

Also, one of the places where Violet had fun was in the atrium, which was just a garden in the middle of the museum that had big koi fish in a stream, and a little waterfall.

The last thing we did before we left was watch the "Ice Age Encounter" show!  It is similar to the Dinosaur Encounter show we watch at the Natural History Museum, but with a saber-toothed cat instead of a dinosaur.  Violet was very excited-scared the whole time!

He got pretty close to us once and roared right in our faces!  Even I felt a little jumpy!

(Also, just so you don't feel too jealous of me living by this cool museum:  It is less than 5 miles from my house and it took me 35 minutes to drive there.  Traffic is so fun.  We got home in 10 minutes though, since traffic had cleared up by the time we were done!)