Sooooooooooooooooooo...

Went to a couple of museums this past weekend with a couple of friends. On Friday it was the Museum of Science with H. At one point we happened upon an older gentleman inflating sheep lungs with a hand pump. The lungs were connected to a sheep heart but that was all the sheep there was. H ably answered a question or two about the lungs, and I just managed to stop myself from bragging about her hands-on rib spreader experience.

I asked where the rest of the sheep was and was told it was on its way to somebody's dinner plate. Then someone brought up haggis, and I looked around and realized H and I were in a coffee klatch of sorts with a group of older male volunteers. They started talking about how factory-made haggis works, and one of them tried to gross me out by telling me hot dogs have lungs in them. Didn't work. H and I soon moved on to try and reassemble a supine plastic torso with removable innards and interchangeable genitalia. Next we watched a hip replacement surgery video. Surprisingly to me, this skeeved H out. I mentioned how creepily robotic it seemed to put metal pins and parts into flesh and bone, and this is what gave H the heebie-jeebies. It's interesting to learn what will do that to a person, especially a person who has spread another person's torso apart to peer inside at a beating heart.

Later I was surprised at my own reaction to a museum video, of a home birth in Mexico. It's one of four videos(fetal growth/c-section/va-jay-jay-ginal/home birth) in the museum's learnin' 'bout babies area. The movies are sort of hidden in this column in the center of the exhibit, and there are warnings that they show "actual human birth" but in my opinion (and that I had this opinion is what surprised me, given my hippie tendencies) they may have wanted to provide a bit more detail about what a person might see in that live birth. Especially if they choose the home birth option. Because what you get with that option is SERIOUS hippie. As in, Japanese sculptor married to Mexican lady, living on farm in Mexico, labor and delivery filmed by grampa, and by the end nearly everybody (not including gramps, but including two young boys) is nudie-caboodie in a dirty bathtub.

Prior to hopping in the tub, the mother announced in a voice-over that she was hungry enough, while in labor, to eat "three plates of rice and beans."

YUCK.