U Penn Museum Excursion

Yes, he has a mohawk and no, I didn't do it.  His father did.

We are in our third week of studying Ancient Egypt with Tapestry of Grace.  I am lucky enough to be living (at the moment!) near enough to Philly to go to this Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology.  Even better, our library has a free pass you can check out like a book for three days!  And even better than that (if you are a seven year old boy), we got to take the train into the city to get to the museum.  We just had to walk a  few blocks after we got off of the train at 30th Street.  I was kind of counting on signs pointing out this attractions, as they do for things like the Liberty Bell and US Mint, but I was wrong.  I will take this opportunity to say that I have a very unusual husband (but if you know me personally, you knew that!)  He stopped a man and asked him for directions.  I hate asking for directions.  But for the record, I had the right address in my head, was heading in the right direction, and would have gotten us there eventually.  I think we even went a few blocks further West than we had to, but I digress.
This museum covers all of Ancient History, including Canaan, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans and Buddhists, as well as Mesoamerica.  Everything we will eventually touch on this year.  But our real reason for going was that guy and his friends- The Mummies!

  These guys were replicas, I think. But this guy:

is the largest sphinx on American soil.  He is made of red granite and weighs 12 tons.  We had an interesting discussion about how they weighed him and why he is only "believed to be" the third largest in the world.  Is someone just too lazy or unable to weigh the others?  And how did they get him here?  Plane?  Boat?  After all, though he is heavy, he's not really that big!  DD3 was scared of the "elephant thing," so we had to move on.  Behind him, there are some very nicely preserved columns from palaces and temples, some with their colors intact!  Pretty cool.

DD10 had her picture taken with this statue because it is featured in her literature selection, A Place in the Sun by Jill Rubalcaba.

And finally, a few more fun bits of information.
Not just a cat:

There's room in there for a mummy of your kitty to go to the afterlife with you.
And this?

Not for the coffee table.  That's a canopic jar for embalming your stomach and taking it with you.  Do you think my kids will ever forget what a canopic jar is?  I don't think so.

We ate lunch in the student cafeteria, so I took pics of this experience, which my poor un-socialized homeschooled kids miss.

 But as DD12 pointed out, there was no one there to spit tomato soup on us, so it wasn't a realistic experience.  Too bad.

Coming up:  Tomorrow we're building our Botany Light Hut, and I hope to remember to take some pictures of that as I am sure it will be illuminating...heh, heh, heh....So, if you happen to live near by and see a strange glow emanating from our camper area, fear not.  It's a compact fluorescent bulb!

I forgot to take pictures of us taxonomizing our shoes.  Apologies.  That particular exercise actually went better than I anticipated, even if we only had one item in the Kingdom:  Work shoe; Phyla:  Boot.