We have been working soooooooooooooo hard on this house to sell it and prepare for our move to Virginia, that we had to finally take a break and let off some steam!  Last summer I had gotten season passes to the Witte Museum.  They have a major exhibit that changes out three times a year.  Last summer we got to experience Leonardo da Vinci's machines.  Last autumn we immersed ourselves in bluebonnets and found Lafayette.  Now we got to delve into DNA.

     This was terrific timing since the kids have recently studied DNA in their science curriculum.  A lot of it was review, yet a wonderful opportunity to cement the concepts into their minds.

They got to see how DNA is normally spiraled...

They reviewed how adenine and thymine pair up, whereas guanine and cytosine make a match.

If one actually listened, there was a voice over that explained the DNA model.

Here they got to race the clock to make all the matches of A's to T's and C's to G's themselves...

Ta Da!

     There were lots of interesting displays that I never got pictures of.  There was a cool model of the cell where the kids got to move a camera over the different parts to see video and explanation of the different parts, like the endoplasmic reticulum (don't you love that word?), golgi bodies, nucleus, etc.  It was a great review for my daughter and introduction for my son. 

     I don't remember much else.  I was exhausted.  I hadn't slept much in months, worrying whether my husband would get a job. Then when he got it, we worked long days to get things spit spot to sell the house and to get rid of extras in preparation for the move.  After I saw all the displays, I decided to go sit on the nice comfortable padded bench against the wall and simply be quiet and relax.  Ahhhhhh.....it was so comfortable, I fell asleep!  When I woke up, the kids wanted me to do this machine.  This was easy.  It was merely matching up adenine and thymine and cytosine to guanine pairs for a code.  However I was so tired I wasn't quite comprehending what the code was and the kids weren't making much sense!  But they were impressed I was able to rotate the different strands of DNA to find the right match.  Oh that is so easy, I can do that in my sleep!