Boston Trip Post #2: Children's Museum, Tea Party Museum, and ICA

Our first full day in Boston involved visits to several different museums. Lucy was great on each day of the trip, and she almost always fell asleep for a nap right when we needed her to (which was usually as we traveled between locations).

Sam got to choose our activity for the first morning, and he wanted to visit the Children's Museum. We got into this museum for free with our membership to a local museum at home, which made me enjoy our visit all the more.

This picture isn't the highest quality, but I love the expression on Sam's face in this picture.

The Boston Tea Party Museum is located just across a short bridge from the Children's Museum. You can see the reconstruction of the merchant ship The Eleanor in this photo, which I took from a window near the entrance of the Children's Museum.

The beginning part of the tour began with a condensed reenactment of the Old South Meeting House gathering of the Sons of Liberty. We were encouraged to shout things like "Huzzah!" or "Fie!" at various points of the meeting, which Sam enjoyed. I also liked that the end of the tour included a short video clip explaining what happened at Lexington and Concord about sixteen months after the Boston Tea Party. (We didn't make plans to visit Lexington and Concord after that point, since I felt like Sam had an introduction to that aspect of Boston history through the film.)

The East India Company was one of the first to develop a corporate logo. The "U" at the top stands for "united." The heart shape is an aerial view of a ship, and the "4" at the top is a stylized sail.

Sam's favorite part of the tour was the chance to throw "tea" into the harbor. I'm quite proud of this action shot.

We bought Sam a tricorn hat, which I think was probably one of the biggest highlights of the trip. He is holding his Mohawk feather "disguise" that was given to us when we began the museum tour. He likes to stick some of these feathers in the folds of his new hat, and we joke about how he is like Yankee Doodle when he does that.

After the Boston Tea Party museum, we put Lucy in her stroller and she immediately fell asleep. We walked a few blocks to the Institute of Contemporary Art so I could see an exhibition on the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão. This exhibition was one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Boston at this time of year, since it is the first solo museum show in the United States. I talk a little about Varejão's work when I teach about Brazilian colonial art, since her art touches on controversies that relate to Brazil's colonial past. So it was fun for me to see her work in person and also learn more about her career.

It was neat to see how many of Varejão's pieces are quite large. I had Sam stand in this picture to give a sense of scale. 

We ate dinner that night at Flour Bakery, which was delicious. Just about everything on their menu looked appetizing to me. I could eat there every day.