Vacation Week

It is vacation week here. I am pretty sure every school in Connecticut has this week off from school.

I was looking into taking the girls on a day trip to the Boston Museum of Science. Maybe even hooking my parents into going with us. That was until I saw the little box on the side of the Museum's webpage: "Events during Vacation Week: Feb 18-25". Apparently every school on Massachusetts has the week off too.

Several years ago when we had bought a membership to the Boston Museum, we would take day trips. We got up to the museum one such day to find it teeming with kids of all ages. We quickly came to realize we had come during a vacation day. We asked one of the staff at the member window what was going on and she explained that during school vacations the museum plans special activities and many parents will drop off their children, pay the $9-12 per kid, and get cheap babysitting for the day. As long as the kids aren't blatantly misbehaving noone ever realizes whether or not the parents are even in the city. The look on her face let us know they were none too thrilled about it.

It was not our best experience at the museum. While the kids there weren't abusive or totally out of control (Their parents probably threatened them with death), there were just a lot of unsupervised kids milling around in packs, being loud, and well, acting like kids do when they are unsupervised.

So while my kids would have been thrilled with a spontaneous trip to Boston, it won't be happening this week!