My sister-in-law G. is about to leave on a trip around the world. The trip will take four months and will mostly be conducted by ship. The idea of such a trip brings to mind assorted Victorian travelogues, cunning illustrated notebooks full of amusing anecdotes told by a woman of unquestioned virtue about her eccentric fellow passengers and the exotic sights she sees. This, however, being the twenty-first rather than the nineteenth century, the documentation of her trip is forcing G. to confront her inner technophobe and invest in a laptop and digital camera. In order to test out her new setup, G. e-mailed me some pictures she�d taken of AJ a couple of months ago. In order to accomplish this amazing feat, she had set herself up with an A0L account, through which she uploaded her photos to a webpage and then forwarded a link to me. When I attempted to download them to my own computer, I was told I could do that but was warned not to use the photos in �an unexpected way.� Unexpected? Just what constitutes unexpected? If I blow the pictures up and turn them into wallpaper for my guest bathroom? If I import them to photoshop and draw silly mustaches on them? If I print them out and roll naked on them? If I enclosed them in an envelope along with a large check and sent it to the White House? Now THAT would be unexpected.

I am, in any case, looking forward to coming up with many new and exciting unexpected ways to use the photos that G. will be e-mailing us from abroad. I�ll be able to travel from the comfort of home. And without all the malaria shots!

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AJ and I spent the morning at a museum known as Healthworld where he got to crawl through a giant heart, make a mechanical guy burp by pumping huge amounts of soda into his mouth at an alarming speed, slide through a log tunnel and try to rock climb on the acne of giant face. He also liked driving the ambulance in the emergency room display. The ambulance was the real thing, a retired vehicle from the local fire department set up with a video shown through the windscreen that made it look like you were actually driving the thing rapidly through traffic to the scene of an accident where a little girl had been knocked off her bike by a speeding car. AJ really liked driving, although he couldn�t see over the wheel and he had the alarming habit of leaping from the moving vehicle every time the siren turned on. I�m not sure this kid will be looking at a career as a paramedic.

The most notable thing about the museum for me was the fact that in almost every exhibit, clearly carefully designed with the help of Education Professionals �, the kids were having the most fun by completely misusing the displays. For example, the kids had taken all of the plastic food from an exhibit on nutrition (where they were supposed sort the food into a giant food pyramid) and took it to the recycling display, where they played basketball with it into pretend recycling bins. And in the pretend doctor�s office, where they could put on lab coats in front of a blue screen and watch themselves in front of a video backdrop, they had more fun watching their blue-jeaned legs disappear when they took off their lab coats. Look, Mom, I'm invisible!

I�m not sure that AJ got much out of the experience from an educational standpoint. He was pretty distracted by all of the activity and noise. Although he did spend a long time playing with an X-Ray machine, examining all the pictures of people�s insides.

On our way out, we poked our heads in the museum gift shop where we found a set of the nine planets in beautiful glow-in-the-dark colors. We came home and hung them over his bed. I�ve never seen him more happy about taking a nap. �I think Jupiter is my favorite planet.� �Why is that your favorite?� I asked. �Because it�s big and red. And I think your favorite is Uranus.� �Why is that my favorite?� �Because it�s the blue-green gas giant that�s tipped over.� �Good reason.� So he already knows more about the solar system than I do. At least he�s not cracking jokes about the planet�s name. Yet.

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