Gainesville: Part Two

On the way to the Florida Museum of Natural History, Jake entertained us once again with his Club Penguin mad libs: “The crowd at the lighthouse was pooing with anticipation, waiting for their favorite band to come onstage. The minutes went by. Then the lights went down and the announcer said, ‘Please put your butt cheeks together for the Penguin Band!’”

I was giggling and giggling.

We had such a great time at the museum’s Butterfly Rainforest, a vivarium full of hundreds of butterflies and tropical birds (weaver birds and finches and tiny tropical quail). We sat on little wrought-iron benches amid the palms and parlor maples and bromeliads and watched blue morphos and wood nymphs slowly flutter about. Sometimes they’d alight on our shoulders or hair. Bunny and Sophie and I sat dreamily and quietly, softly murmuring things like, “Neat . . .” And “Wow . . .” And “It’s so pretty in here. . . .”

Sophie was being so good, taking time to notice and appreciate all the little things. She was spotting little tiny dime-sized turtles and baby finches. . . .

Jake was being good too, but he was soon ready to move on to the museum’s other exhibits.

“Um,” Jake asked as the butterflies fluttered all around us, “is anybody getting a little bit bored?”

“No,” Sophie said.

Kris took a picture of Jake among the butterflies and tropical flowers and later she put it on her Facebook page with this caption: “Jake had just learned about blue morpho butterflies and bromeliads at school, so he was jazzed to see them in real life. That didn’t stop him from whining the whole time.”

There were owl butterflies sitting very still on mango and banana slices. And the weaver birds were flying around—a brilliant tangerine color. There was a pond with tiny turtles and enormous koi. Sophie was being so cute, pointing everything out, and Bunny was trying to identify everything with a big laminated identification card. I was being kind of dumb, just sitting under a tree fern, thinking, Gosh, it sure is pretty in here.

We stayed at the museum all day, wandering through the exhibits and making fun of Jake. He was being so cute and dumb. At one point, he got separated from the rest of us very briefly. Yet even though his absence was but momentary, he tried to milk it for all it was worth. He said to Kris in his dramatic way, “Mommy, I hate you. I was looking all over for you, and then I sat down and cried for a minute.”

I smiled slyly. “More like a second, I think.”

“We just saw you,” Kris said, laughing and rolling her eyes.

Jake was trying to suppress a smile. He said he thought Kris should get him a present from the gift shop so he’d feel better.

Before we left the museum, we made some of those squashed souvenir pennies, one of the simple pleasures of being on vacation. Jake and Sophie were both being very dramatic and getting mad at each other for absolutely no reason—which, for me, was really just part of the fun. I kept laughing at them. I just can’t take them seriously.