BART to art

Laurel took her first ride on BART yesterday afternoon! (That's the local subway train, more formally known as Bay Area Rapid Transit.)



She liked the train as long as she could see out of the window, but she got bored on the long dark trip through the tunnel under the San Francisco Bay. Also she got tired of sitting on our laps and wanted to walk around. Perhaps 21 months is the worst age for confined travel?



Isaac entertained himself by looking at a Lego catalog. Being five years old has its advantages.



We were on BART because Craig and I took the kids to San Francisco to see an exhibit of works by the illustrator Maira Kalman (whom you may know from her children's books or New Yorker covers).



I thought Isaac would like the exhibit, but he didn't even give it a chance. He became sulky and negative as soon as we walked in the gallery. Maybe he used up all his good will on the trip to the city? He refused to look at the paintings on the wall, and spent the entire time looking at the large selection of Kalman's picture books that had been set out for review.



Laurel, on the other hand, had a good time (well, for about 20 minutes). I carried her around and showed her each painting, and she happily announced the subject of each one. "Dog! Dog! Doggie!" was her most common cry (there were a lot of dog paintings!), but she also got to identify things like camels, couches, hats, buckets, kids, books, and cups of coffee.



I hope our fellow museum-goers didn't mind her enthusiasm. It wasn't like we were trying to absorb some serious (and humorless) abstract expressionism, after all.



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Both kids have been to art museums before, but perhaps we should do it more often.



Over the summer we all went to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (twice!), about five months ago Isaac went with me to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in December we all went to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a year ago we all went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Going back a while, when Isaac was 15 months old we went to the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina, and when he was 22 months old we went to the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe.



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And Isaac first rode BART when he was 19 months old. This trip he was finally old enough to need his own ticket, which cost $8.30!