Snowy Denver Days
We spent two days in Denver for our snowy vacation, and the weather was definitely on our side. On the first day we got a warm sunny start, with enough snow to explore and have a good time. Snow angels, a collaborative fort, snowball throwing all around and tiny snowmen in Capitol Park.
A huge favorite of everyone was the interactive game of evolution, pretty much a very well-explained genetic algorithm where they enforce "natural" selection over 6 generations of slow/fast bright/camouflaged butterflies to see what the species becomes in the end.
My favorite part of this day I call Mission Impossible.
Gaius carefully put together a little snowball and got an extremely mischievous look on his face. He slowly and quietly stalked his way up to Mara, planning to throw it at her. He got really close, just behind her, as she was so focused on building her fort. After a long, tense, suspenseful moment of quietly holding the snowball high, ready to throw it.... Bam!!! He missed. The projectile narrowly passed by Mara's back even though the two of them were barely two feet away. Mara never noticed, parents snickered quietly at the cuteness of the mission. Gaius moved on to the next target.
When we had our fill of snow play, we walked along the streets for a long while, enjoying the snow mounds and cracking frozen puddles along the way. Our destination: a sweet midday treat at a French dessert place that was most wondrously decorated for Valentine's day. We couldn't have asked for a better photo shoot space...
The rest of the day we spent at the Denver Children's Museum: climbing, kinetics and tools workshop. This teamwork contraption got us involved for quite a long time:
On the second day it got 15 degrees colder. Peaceful snow flurries rewarded us with beautifully symmetric flakes on the early afternoon, and the slow evening traffic to match.
We visited the aquarium which turned out to be way too scary for Gaius! We made it as far as the otter exhibit:
Then we hopped on to the natural history museum with the largest gold nugget in the US and humbling giant dinosaur skeletons.
Btw this is how tall the kids are right now:
The kids tended to select for brightest and fastest. The game was impressively well designed to explain Darwinism!
Here's Mara in snow with wolves at the Museum of Natural History at the end of the day:
In the end, we had our fill of snow and cold weather just in time for the return train trip the next morning.
Happy Ski Week break!
That's nice! For kids that grew up in California, it must be so exciting to see the snow and do all the fun activities!
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