When I was young I used to annoy my extended family with my insistance to visit museums and spend hours exploring them. I remember one particular episode in Munich where I dragged my uncle and my cousin to the “German Museum” – a sprawling complex of a natural history museum complete with planetarium, artifical coal mine, chemistry department, airplanes, biology, everything under the sun and many buttons to push that would put something in motion. I loved it – for seven hours – and everybody hated me. I didn’t get why, being the little geek I was I couldn’t imagine a better place to be.
Now I have a little geek on my hands and I am quickly developing an understanding for those tortured relatives. First, it was tools: every tool, any tool, big, small, old, new the more dangerous the better. Every stick we found on the street was either a hammer or a welding apparatus, even extra large cookies that look somewhat like the famous Austrian “Manner” were called “big axe-Manner”. I spent hours in the garage, either freezing or sweating (somehow temperature control in garages is still a very developing science) hammering nails into boards and helping Max to pull them out again.
Now there are volcanoes and most recently Majan pyramids (“pyraminen”). We own every single vulcanoe DVD suitable for kids, we have crossed the world and the seven seas numerous times on Google Earth to find where the most, best, most dangerous volcanoes are, we clicked on pictures, read books, painted vulcanoes with and without lava, with and without magma chambers. We built sand replicas of every single of the Western US vulcanoes starting with Mount Shasta all the way up to Mount Baker. Once we were done with that we built Mt Fuji, Galleras, Pinatubo, Vesuvius, Etna, …. At one point we counted 27 vulcanoes in the sand box which we had to defend against unruly hordes of other playing kids who thought they were simple mountains which they could drive their toy cars over.
Now there also are “pyraminen”. Yesterday we went to Dzibilchaltun (a word that Max now pronounces with amazing ease) the closest pyramids to Merida. We arrived there at the infamous “only mad dogs and Englishmen are out” hour (that is the hottest time of the day) and I was mentally prepared for a lot of whining along the lines of: “boooring, I want to sit in the shade, I want ice cream, sob!!” But there was my little blondie, his cheeks fire red from the heat, running up and down the pyraminen. We had to climb every single one and then he wanted to start over. I had to put my foot down, literally: no more pyramids, we are not climbing any more pyramids. You stop now and drink some water.
Today he wanted to go back to Dzilbilchaltun and climb the pyramids again. We took him to the beach instead – and built some volcanoes with sand.
Here he is with an – obviously – very angry Mount St. Helens that has just errupted seagrass lava.