preparing for the trip

It may seem to be a bit premature to start preparing for our trip to Ethiopia, but we want to help Julianna to grasp what she sees, without it overwhelming her. On our forum we recently had a bunch of families post different Youtube videos, and many showed the city and people so we have been watching these to get an idea about the living and travelling conditions . It is so hard to see all of the begging children and homeless people, and Julianna, poor thing, does not understand how everyone does not have a home or enough food. I am worried about how the people and poverty will color Julianna's memories of the trip, some on our forum have said that their kids were not overly bothered by the homelessness, but were upset by the begging children. I think we are going to have to try to shield Julianna from the majority of the poverty, but explain that it is there and that we can all do something to help alleviate it. Well we have time to prepare and will do our best to make this new experience less scary.
On a different front we have just watched A night at the Museum, and loved it!!! I used to dream about what would happen if the museum came to life, and this movie is just what i imagined!! The best part is that in a few weeks we are going to visit the American Museum Natural History where the movie was set. It is a cool museum and they have a great website with all sorts of learning tools about dinosaurs, fossils, mammals and ancient humans. It is a great site and we have been enjoying it for homeschooling recently, we have been learning about how fossils are formed, and how small changes in form and function over a long time can make all the difference in how species evolve. We are also enjoying the walk through tours they have online so we can plan our trip, the museum is large and we want to be able to see certain areas like the amazing dioramas, and the biodiversity halls, and of course the dinosaurs. We can't wait to go, it will be a great trip, we love New York and have found some new fun things to try this visit.
Well we are off to enjoy our day together and explore the AMNH website and learn some more fun things about our ancient history, on a fun side note we will be able to view a replica of "lucy" the oldest human skeleton ever found when we visit the AMNH, she will be in the dioramas about the human evolution, and when we visit Ethiopia we will be able to see the real "Lucy" on display at the National Museum in Addis, so this will be fun to compare!