What do grandparents have to contribute to your kids understanding of how the planet fits together? Plenty. To that end, we celebrate National Grandparents Day this Sunday, Sept. 9.
It didn’t take this particular grandfather (a.k.a. ‘Buppa’) long to come up with the perfect place to take the grandkids: Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of American History.
Here’s why it’s the destination of choice: Grandparents can make the museum come alive through their eyes. Exhibits that were merely three-dimensional suddenly take on a fourth through the interpretation of a person who’s ridden in a 1958 Edsel, played 45 rpm records on their own phonograph, and grew up watching Captain Kangaroo.
Here are some National Museum of American History must-sees:
- America on the Move, a 26,000 square-foot collection of things that have moved America over the decades, such as a 1903 Winton, the first car drive across the country. Part of road that carried many a grandpa and grandma across the nation is here too, a 40-foot stretch of Route 66. Then there’s the entry from the age of rail, a 199-ton, 92-foot-long Southern Railway locomotive.
- Electricity Hall. Although the current crop of grandparents isn’t old enough to rightly remember a time when folks lived without electricity, they can at least tell the grandkids about the magic it begat. Electricity Hall chronicles the revolution. Go way, way back here. See an array of early electric appliances for the home. Some worked well, like the electric fan. Others flopped. Witness the fate of the poor electric marshmallow toaster.
- The whole family can revel in the museum’s American Stories section, where you’ll find a slew of treasures. There’s a piece of Plymouth Rock, Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, a Kermit the Frog puppets – as well as other artifacts that shaped the cultural landscape of who we are.
(Image: Rob Shenk)
