Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Yesterday was quite the day. We started off by heading to Toronto East General Hospital, ostensibly with the idea of visiting the birthing rooms, which Erika was told by our midwife was ready. Turns out the new birthing rooms will not actually be ready until July, which is cutting things close since the birth is due in early August! So in the end we had a consultation session, got a sense of how Toronto East General works. Arguably the best part was Vanessa getting to see a day-old baby, courtesy of a proud new mother and father who were in the waiting room at the time. Since Erika has been working on the movie set until late last night, I volunteered to take Vanessa to the Ontario Science Centre so that Erika could go back home and catch another 40 winks. I forgot that this is still considered March Break, so the place was swarming with the young 'uns -- more so that usual it seemed to me. The more kids the better, as far as Vanessa is concerned, and she had a blast. If it had a button, it was pushed. If it had a knob, it was turned. I suspect that very little actual science was learned, but at three years old I can't say I'm terribly concerned (though I did my best to point things out and try to explain things occasionally, and pointed out the 3D models of babies growing in the womb, but they didn't have any buttons you could push. ;-) Of note was the Science Centre's K’NEXhibition, where kids could come and put things together with K'nex building "blocks". K'nex are a little bit advanced for Vanessa, who is more into Lego and Duplo. More Euclidian, I guess. ;-) Using one of the computer systems there, Vanessa really seemed to "get" the idea of using a mouse, with a little bit of prompting from me. The buttons to click were big, and the equivalent mouse "button" was a big, red, lighted button. Easy to put two and two together (UI designers take note! ;-) Vanessa had a ton o' fun, and didn't really want to head back home, but after almost 6 hours there, Dad was pretty darn tired too. Now that she's old enough to really get into things, I know we'll be back there plenty of times, so I ended up getting a membership while I was at it.