A Fish Story

It was “free week” at all of the local museums. Shosh thought it might be fun to take Kivi to the Aquarium, since at his age (7 months) he liked to stare at things, and just about everything in the world was still new and interesting (including fish.)

We planned to leave at about noon, but we didn’t actually leave until after 1:00 because Kivi was sleeping, and we waited for Ilana to get done with her exam so she could go with us, and finally Ilana came but then we couldn’t find Kivi’s pacifier and as we all know you can’t POSSIBLY go anywhere without it (The Pacifier: Don’t Leave Home Without It.)

But finally we found the pacifier and collected the car seat and the stroller and the diaper bag and the sippy cup and the diapers and the wipes and the change of clothing and the baby toys and the jar of Strained Butternut Squash and the bib and the tuna sandwiches (on bagels) for the 3 of us who don’t like Strained Butternut Squash, and 3 purses and the car keys, and oh yes, the baby, and we clumsily made our way down the 3 flights of stairs out of Shosh’s apartment and across the street and into the car.

We drove down to the museum campus, but we had to park really far away, because since it was free week at the museums there were a ton of cars. But parking only cost $6—a bargain, I thought, for downtown—and we planned to take the free trolley from the parking lot to the Aquarium. So we parked the car and packed up the pacifier and collected the stroller and the diaper bag and the sippy cup and the diapers and the wipes and the change of clothing and the baby toys and the jar of Strained Butternut Squash and the bib and the tuna sandwiches (on bagels) for the 3 of us who don’t like Strained Butternut Squash, and 3 purses and the car keys, and oh yes, the baby, and walked all the way back to the entrance to the parking lot where people were waiting for the trolley.

Just as we approached the trolley stop, we saw the trolley approaching, and we congratulated ourselves on our luck. But then we noticed a man a uniform shouting something, and when we got closer, we could hear him announcing that there was an hour-long wait to get into the History Museum, and an hour-and-a-half wait to get into the Aquarium, but no wait at the Planetarium. Well, we thought, since Kivi didn’t know the difference and would be just as happy staring at Martians as he would at fish, we would just go to the Planetarium. So we started to fold up the stroller to get on the trolley.

But then the man in the uniform announced that this particular trolley wasn’t going to the Planetarium.

Well, OK, we thought, we’d just wait for the Other Trolley, the one that did go to the Planetarium. But the uniformed man informed us that the Other Trolley had broken down.

So, we walked. The path to the Planetarium goes right along the lake, so ordinarily it would have been a nice walk. But it was so chilly and windy and foggy that we couldn’t even see the lake, even though we were standing practically right next to it. And it was the middle of JUNE, for crying out loud! We were definitely being cheated out of a large portion of our summer.

But I digress.

We finally got to the Planetarium, and admission was, indeed, free, and we went in and walked around. There wasn’t really anything in the exhibits that would be of particular interest to a 7-month-old. Mostly there were pictures of galaxies and computer simulations of supernovas and so on, and lots of signs to read. (And, brilliant though he is, he was not reading yet at seven months.)

So we sat down in the snack bar to eat our tuna sandwiches, and Kivi ate his Strained Butternut Squash. Shosh had forgotten to bring a spoon, so I got a plastic spoon from the snack bar, but all they had was soup spoons, and they were too big for Kivi’s mouth, so most of the Strained Butternut Squash went on his cheeks and his nose and his chin instead of in his mouth. But I think that babies actually can absorb nutrients through their skin. That’s why they smear the food all over themselves when they eat. In fact, that’s why mothers instinctively take their babies’ shirts off when the babies are eating spaghetti or yogurt. I’ll bet you thought it was so their shirts wouldn’t get dirty, but you would be wrong. It’s actually to provide more surface area on the skin for the nutrients from the food to be absorbed directly into the bloodstream.

After Kivi was done eating, Shosh put him down on the floor (which was carpeted) and he rolled around and practiced crawling. He hadn’t quite figured it out, though. He got up on his hands and knees, and then picked his knees up so he was on his hands and toes, and then he put the top of his head down on the floor. He hadn’t got the crawling part yet, but he could almost do a headstand.

There was a railing around the area where the tables were, and a few little kids with their parents were watching Kivi from the other side of the railing and making faces at him to make him laugh. He was apparently more interesting than a lot of the other exhibits.

At about 4:00, we decided to check the status of the lines at the Aquarium, so we walked over there, and Kivi fell asleep in the stroller. When we got there, there was only a short line, so we went in and looked at the fish, and after a while Kivi woke up and Shosh took him out of the stroller. He looked a little dazed. Not surprising, when you consider that he went to sleep in outer space, and when he woke up less than an hour later, he was under the sea. It must be very disconcerting to find yourself in a completely different place every time you wake up. I think I’d be afraid to go to sleep. Maybe that’s why babies scream and cry when you try to get them to go to sleep—they know that as soon as they close their eyes, the whole universe could change completely, and they might wake up to find everything completely changed and unfamiliar.

At one point, we were standing in front of a huge tank that went all the way from the floor to the ceiling, watching enormous sharks and tuna swim by. Shosh remarked that it was probably a good thing that we had eaten our tuna sandwiches at the Planetarium. We wondered if the restaurant in the Aquarium building served fish—would that be an ethical problem? We went downstairs to the restaurant to see if they had fish on the menu. But the restaurant was closed. We squinted through the glass and tried to see if there was a menu posted somewhere, but we couldn’t see one. There was an information desk just a few feet away, though, so I went over there and asked the woman at the desk, “Do they serve fish in the restaurant?”

She just said, “I don’t know. The restaurant’s not open.”

She didn’t get it.

We went back upstairs and looked at the fish for a few more minutes, but Kivi was getting cranky so we left the Aquarium and went outside to see if the line for the trolley was reasonably short (it wasn’t) so we walked back to the car and drove home at 2 miles per hour in rush hour traffic. (I wonder why it’s called “rush hour.” No one was rushing, as far as I could tell. It wasn’t possible to rush, there were too many cars. They really should call it something like “crawl hour” instead.)