The Health Museum and Fort Jackson

I have been pretty busy lately and have been too tired and/or lazy to blog about it all. For instance, I visited my sister and her boys a few weeks ago and never blogged about the cool museum we went to. So after unloading some pics from my camera I decided to post several to just show what we have been up to.

We visited Jenni on a rainy, rainy weekend early March and had planned to go to the newly renovated and reopened Houston Children's Museum. But when we got to the museum district we saw that the line to get into the Children's Museum was around the stinking block from the entrance. They had just reopened and were having a no-entrance-fee Saturday so the entire city was there. We decided to visit another museum in the area, the Natural History Museum, but found that other people must have decided the same thing because the lines there were also huge and intimidating. Instead we decided to hike through the rain and puddles over to the Health Museum. No one wants to visit the health museum, right? Right. It was not busy. But it was cool. Check out the huge game of Operation! How cool is that?


And they had a body you could tour. Like you walk into the guy's mouth and then through the stomach, etc. Jackson had fun in there, he liked sitting on the molars. He enjoyed it until we got into the brain section and there were all these electric currents and a huge eye sitting there looking at him. That kind of freaked him out. More than kind of. We retreated into a side room to get away from the eye, only to find a wall of life-sized fetuses. Sounds sick, but it was a cool look at the development of a baby from fertilized egg to term. But imagine leaving the brain/eye trippy room and entering the hall of fetuses and you can imagine why we quickly retreated to the huge Operation game. That was truly cool.


This weekend my Dad came to town and we spent many, many hours building a swingset/playscape in my backyard. We didn't realize when we bought it how many hundreds of pieces of wood and thousands of screws and bolts and pieces it was in. Man. The directions said it would take two people 8-10 hours to put together. I am pretty sure we overshot that. Half of Saturday and most of Sunday and we are still not quite done with the roof. And we need to dig out from under one of the legs so it doesn't tilt quite so much. But it is swingable and slideable at least and Jackson loves it. When we quit for the night on Sunday he kept begging us not to put his swingset away. Heh. As if we could. Here is the almost finished product. We are calling it Fort Jackson. It will be nicer once it gets a roof. But we ran out of sunshine, energy and weekend.



Before we started on the fort, we stopped by our local bank to deposit a check and they were having a freebie day. All kinds of crap with Compass written all over it, free pizza, radio station remote - all that stuff. But the cool thing was the clown lady painting faces. Jackson has always refused to have his face painted before, but this time she suggested she make him look like a kitty and he agreed that he'd like to be a purple kitty. I got a picture quickly cause I knew it wouldn't last. And as I expected, he hated the stuff on his face and we had to immediately go to the bathroom to wash it off. He kept saying he didn't want to be a kitty forever. "I want to be a boy, not a kitty!" Funny child.


I went back to the pulmonologist today to get the results from my tests from last week and there was good and not so good news. My heart looks good, he said. Functioning fine even though it beats a little off now and then. But my lung function tests showed that I am not moving air in and out of my lungs as well as I should be. He called it Hyperactive airway disease. Which googling shows is the description of a group of disorders, including asthma. He didn't say I have asthma though this is probably asthma-like. He prescribed singulair and advair and I have to stay on my allegra. We will do all these meds at first to see if we can get it under control, then cut back on them to see if I can get by on less. I hope that is the case, cause I would rather not be on all kinds of drugs forever. Though if they help me breath, I guess I will do it.

I got home to a bill from the radiologist for $500 more than my insurance company said they could bill me. So here we go again. Procedures, followed by hours spent on hold trying to get the billing errors taken care of. Sigh. I know, at least I have insurance.

On a fun note, I booked a Bed and Breakfast in Boston for me and Andrea'. Have I mentioned that Andrea' and I are going to Boston at the end of April? Well we are! Four days of checking out Boston and Salem, Mass. I will miss Jackson and David, but I sure am looking forward to getting away with my best friend. I know we will have a good time. And get this, the B&B is called Encore and it is a modernly decorated row house in the historic South End with decor and rooms named for playwrights. We are in the Sondheim Room. I can't wait!

I start rehearsals for Hay Fever on Wednesday. I am excited and ready to get back out there and into a show.