I will freely admit to it: I am a geek.
I’ve always loved dinosaurs (never lost that childhood fascination with them) and will spend hours and hours exploring the exhibits at the Royal Tyrrell Museum (which I very fortunately live close to). I love fantasy (how many times have I read/watched Lord of the Rings? There isn’t a big enough number). And do NOT get me started on Ancient Egypt. I’ve been kicked out of the British Museum at closing time after losing an entire day staring wistfully at the Rosetta stone and the stony face of Ramses the Great. Put anything historical in front of me and I will devour it. Seriously. Yesterday I even watched a documentary on TV about Sweden’s King Gustav III. Of whose existence I had been hitherto unaware. But it grabbed me…it was about the past…I couldn’t turn the channel if I wanted to!
See? GEEK.
I blame it on my father, actually, who is a major history-buff, and somehow managed to pass on (either genetically or through parenting, but let’s not delve into the nature/nurture debate here, okay?) his love of all things old to me.
I love history. I love the past. I am fascinated by it. My oldest daughter seems to share some of this geek-ness with me: she also has not yet outgrown her fascination with dinosaurs and is obsessed with Middle-Earth and all things Tolkien (this kid has one-upped me, though, by learning how to spell her own name in runes!) and she and I both love to watch the collection of BBC videos on Prehistoric Earth that I bought her for Christmas two years ago. Her sister? Not so much.
So now we come to the nub of this post. I am super-duper-extra keen on taking my kids to see King Tut at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It just so happens that we’ll be in Toronto on the last two days of this exhibit, and I am going to buy tickets for all of us to go. I saw the treasures of King Tut’s tomb when the exhibit toured in the 1970s during Tut-mania (as it was called at the time) – I remember waking up at 5:00 a.m. and boarding the school bus in the dark to head to the museum. I still remember the spectacular death-mask, which has become the iconic image of ancient Egypt to the modern world.
I think there is a good chance my kids will be bored by it, yet I still feel powerfully compelled to take them. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I feel like it’s an experience they’ll look back on and treasure later in life, as I do my own King Tut experience.
But am I fooling myself? Am I trying to force my own interests on my kids? Will it just register as some dumb blip in their childhoods, or will there come a time that they’ll be grateful I took the time and effort to expose them to these cultural treasures and also to share my own passions with them?
Toronto? Toronto? When? How long?
We’re taking The Boy to go and see it. I can’t wait! He won’t remember anything, but I’ll be sure to sneak in pictures if I can.
I have my undergrad degree in History so, um, I think I’m right there with you in the geek category??
Total geek. You didn’t mention your love of all things Star Trek 😉 I am torn about this because one part of me thinks you are totally right and it could be something they value later but part of me thinks that it could be HELL and TORTURE and then no one will enjoy it. Can you tell which side of me is winning?
you might see how this affects them later on. i read some of the laura ingalls books to my daughter and then later that summer went to kings landing in NB. a year later she comes up with these things, minor details that we hardly even noticed and she was all over them. “hey, do you remember this?”
you’ll be surprised at what leaks in to their minds! i know i am sometimes! 🙂