Real Pirates!

Last Wednesday, thanks to the organizing powers of a fellow homeschooling mom, we caught the tail end of a fabulous exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural History: Real Pirates, by National Geographic. If Real Pirates reaches your hemisphere any time soon (it's on its way to the Field Museum in Chicago right now), I strongly advise that you get thee thence.

I actually had a whole post written about the history of the Whydah and how pirate ships were  the world's only racial melting pots during the 1700's and how we got to touch real, live pieces of eight that had been touched by real, live pirates who probably had never washed their hands or heard of Purell ... and then I accidentally deleted the whole caboodle.

Go me!

And I'm too tired to rewrite it. But just trust me, this was history coming alive in the truest form you can get without actually diving down to the wreck or stepping into a time capsule.

As a cherry on top, I scored a bunch of educational pirate books for $.92 at the gift shop because the exhibit was on its way out.

Even without the Pirates exhibit, the museum's worth a day's gander. We finished up at the museum's Cockrell Butterfly Center.

That's not fright, folks. It's pure, unadulterated wonder. 

Probably reflecting the look on her mother's face.