Trip to OMSI

Last weekend we took the kids on a road trip to Portland to stay with our friends the Barners and visit with some of my family that live nearby. We had a great time, like we always do when we head down there. The Barners are some of our closest friends and we greatly miss having them close by, so we try to make it down for a visit every chance we get.

We watched movies on their huge flat-screen and ate out and just hung around together. We also had a little side adventure visiting the OMSI museum in downtown Portland.

This is Ethan demonstrating one of life's ironies....an eight-year-old boy with wonderfully large listening capabilities!

The touring exhibit they had was one on Leonardo daVinci. It was an amazing exhibit, with models of some of the many inventions he had sketched. It also showed large images of his detailed diagrams of human anatomy, probably the first of its kind. Apparantly it was considered improper to do anything so intimate with the dead, so he had to dissect and examine bodies in secret and often hurriedly. The detail of the particular organs and functions was amazing.

One of the highlights of the exhibit was about his masterpiece the Mona Lisa. There were lots of high-tech photo images of it I didn't understand, but that showed the layers of paint underneath the final product. It revealed the areas which he painted over and changed because he didn't like it, and also revealed that she was originally painted with eyebrows and eyelashes, no longer visible now.

The Mona Heather.

I felt pretty dorky doing this, but the guy standing behind Eric with the camera said that my expression was perfect and looked just like her.

NOT!

Ethan had to top me. I must say that he succeeded.