Infantry Museum

We left for our trip quite uneventfully. Alexander and Zoë rode with Grandpa and Darla. Our van was quiet with the rest of the kids in there. We listened to Hamilton until Columbus, where we stopped at the Infantry Museum (which has been declared America's #1 Free Museum for several years in a row). It was a pretty good stop to make, especially on such a rainy day—we had plenty of space to stretch our legs inside and by the time we were ready for our picnic lunch things had dried up a bit.

We were so proud of Rachel for making it through the museum without a single panic attack (the same can not be said of our visit to Quantico years ago). 

Rather than being frightened of the war scenes on display, Rachel was shaken by how incredibly young the new recruits looked that we saw walking around (often with their families in tow). 

"They're recruiting babies!" Rachel whispered after one kid walked past. 

And they literally are—those kids could be her age.

There's one room that is designed to be like a WWI trench and I determined that I would simply curl up in a corner somewhere and cry if I had had to do that. 

Here's Rachel at the entrance:

I most definitely appreciate the service of our troops...but mostly I think the world would be better if we would all just cry in corners rather than explode things. We could talk about things after we cried, if we wanted to. That might help. But sitting around figuring out how to do the most harm to others feels like a strange fixation...I'm just saying.

For example, here is a wall of an armoured tank. It is six inches thick! It shows what various kinds of explosives do to the tank. One rips its way through, one knocks it and rocks it (with, like, concussion-level, whip-lash-causing movement), and one pierces through and then splits apart showering the inside with shrapnel and stuff.

Figuring all of that out is, in my opinion, the definition of insanity. 

This piece of hardtack might be my favourite artifact from the museum:

It's from 1898 and a soldier wrote on it, "Cuba Must be Free." And now here it sits over 100 years later. That's wild!

The portion of the museum devoted to land mines really spooked me. I know land mines are a problem in many places in the world. When we lived in Jordan and went down to the river to see the traditional baptismal site, there were signs along the trail warning visitors not to step off the trail...because of land mines. But in my head they were always rather large...at least the size of a soup can...and probably fairly heavy. 

But no! 

Some are so small and are designed to look intriguing—even toy-like—to entice people (specifically children) to pick them up to play with them. And that's just cruel.

I could hold this little bomb in the palm of my hand—and it's got that little ribbon on it. Very demure. Very cutesy. Very explosive:

I'm going to need someone to explain to me why we need to target children like this. And while they're at it, perhaps they can explain why we cheer the destruction of some walls and the erection of others. 

Even though it disgusts me how much of our history revolves around conflict, it was a good stop nonetheless.

That was kind of a bummer of a post, so how about a joke?

We were standing in the rotunda at the entrance, waiting for our entire party to dash through the rain and assemble before going inside. In the middle of the rotunda is a larger-than-life statue of an "infantry man." 

"That's an infantry?!" Miriam mused. "I'd hate to see what the full-grown humantry looks like."

"It's adultery," Rachel said. 

She hadn't even meant to make a pun at all, but in condensing Miriam's "full-grown human" phrase to "adult" it just...popped out. We all had a good laugh about that. 

*****

Unrelated topic-wise but related lexicon-wise, but you should have seen Phoebe's face when she was trying to figure out what "toiletries" were when we were packing. She was like, "Everyone's talking about these toilet trees, but I've never seen one!"

She was quite concerned about what she got to pack for this trip (and packed precisely three blankets, one Beanbag Puppy, one bouncy ball, one tube of chapstick, one shirt, one sweater, two pairs of socks, one pair of underwear, and one pull-up. 

I assured her that I would grab her "toiletries" in the morning before we left. I also repacked her bag (and left out the blankets, which she was very upset to find out when we arrived). 

We were about an hour into the drive when she screeched from the back seat, "MY TOOTHBRUSH!!"

"What about your toothbrush?" I asked. 

"Did you get it?" she asked, absolutely frantic.

"I did," I assured her. 

"Oh, thank you!" she said. 

We've got to be doing something right to have her be so concerned about her oral hygiene, right? Every now and again it's nice to get these little hints.