The Getty

Last week Julia and I headed out to West L.A. to meet up with an old friend, Tara and her baby Celeste. Tara was one of my roommates in college and I haven't seen her in ages so I was really excited to see her again! She lives in Japan now with her hubby, but she's in SoCal visiting her in-laws. We decided to meet at the Getty since it's kind of meeting in the middle for both of us. (and Tara had never been there and it's been a couple years since I've been there.)

Yes, we took two babies to a museum. I figured the Getty encourages families to bring their kids so they wouldn't mind us bringing babies. And they didn't, in fact the docents loved them. And there were plenty of other babies there too. This was, however, the fastest I have ever gone through the Getty.I was sad the lady who took our picture didn't get more of Celeste. In fact, I had to crop this photo so you could actually see us. She mostly took a picture of the landscape behind us.That's the ocean out there.

Julia was well behaved during our picnic lunch when we first got there, and she was well behaved for the first room of paintings we saw (the Impressionist room), but by the time we walked through a couple other rooms she was squirming all over the place. She wanted to get down and crawl or walk. Not that I was going to let her run around in the museum, but I was interested to see what she would do, so I let her down after we had moved to a less crowded side room. Poor Julia, the the nice waxed museum floors were so slippery she couldn't get anywhere.

I think the moment that stands out the most to me was as we were leaving a large exhibit featuring drawings by Rembrandt. Celeste was crying. I set Julia down on the floor so I could put something away in her stroller and gave her a water bottle to keep her entertained. Only the water bottle tipped onto it's side and started rolling away. So of course Julia slip slides crawling after it. I opted not to go after her so I could just put the object away and get on with things. So as I struggle to fit whatever it was into the stroller, Tara struggles to get Celeste to stop crying and Julia struggles to get the water bottle, getting farther and farther away from us. All this while everyone entering and exiting looks on. Finally, I get it put away and chase down Julia and we both make a hasty exit outside. It was a little bit of a chaotic moment.Luckily I snatched a picture of Tara with the babies that captures Celeste in her cuteness. Oh yeah, and that's Celeste in Julia's stroller. Julia refused to ride in it.

But we had fun! And the babies really liked the garden. And it felt like we were back in college again having fun as college roommates do, except now we had to change diapers.