Charlotte had the day off from school yesterday in honor of Veterans’ Day, so we got to have one of our Daddy-Daughter Days. One of my favorite things about living in the Boston area is that there are so many places to go and things to see and do with kids, but the downside is that it’s difficult not to be overexposed to them. When I was growing up in Maine, a trip to Boston to go to the New England Aquarium or the Museum of Science was something you might only get to do twice in your entire childhood, but we are regular visitors to those places and most of the other popular destinations. I think Bridget and I do a good job of coming up with hidden gems and lesser-known attractions to visit, but inevitably we also have gotten very familiar with the major ones.

Even with some input from local-area friends, I never quite came up with the right thing for this particular day. Charlotte, however, had already decided that she wanted to go to the Museum of Science in Cambridge. She and I were just there maybe a month ago, but her preference was quite clear, and since I had no better alternative, that became the plan. After some further negotiation, we settled on seeing a planetarium show as the main attraction — the IMAX theater scares her, and the special exhibit on tap right now is about monsters. If you recall my post about our trip to Montreal this past summer, trying to get her to even go into a similar exhibit there was a horrendous experience. The planetarium also makes her a little anxious, but her interest outweighed her anxiety.

It being a school holiday, fully one third of all the families with children who live within a 100-mile radius of Boston were at the museum (the other two thirds being at the Aquarium and the Children’s Museum, natch). The place was packed, but we’re members and get an expedited admission line. That doesn’t do anything about the teeming crowds in all the exhibit halls, but at least we get in for free and get in without a long wait. I had timed it so that we only had a short time to kill before the planetarium show, which also made the time pass easily.

Charlotte’s particular fear about the planetarium show stemmed from the last time we saw one. Part of the program involved a simulated “flyby” of the Moon. The effect of the Moon getting bigger and bigger was very realistic and culminated with the entire dome being filled with the image of it roaring over our heads, just as if we were really flying right under it. I, myself, was thrilled and amazed, but both the wife and child were terrified. Now, Charlotte was afraid that she would have to experience it again. Her existential fears have really come on strong in the last year, and some of them simply overwhelm her. She’s able to have a lot of courage about all sorts of things, but the things that she can’t quite conquer yet can trigger horrible reactions for her. Having lived for over 20 years with Bridget’s lifelong battle with panic disorder, it’s an effort for me to work on keeping my own response appropriate when she freaks out. I don’t think Charlotte suffers from panic disorder, mainly because she is able to find her way through a lot of challenging situations, but it’s hard for me to watch her get so upset over things that I know she doesn’t need to be afraid of.

She weathered the anxiety about the giant planet with only a little clingy behavior. There was no repeat of the effect in the show we saw, and she loved the stories about how the constellations got their names, especially the Estonian tale of “The Birds’ Way”. After a couple of minutes, once it seemed sure there would be no giant planet, she relaxed and enjoyed the show.

Charlotte has her hit list of things to see at the museum pretty well down. She likes to see the chicks in the incubator and the adjoining exhibit about the human body. Sometimes she wants to see the exhibit about how babies are made, but we skipped that one this time. The playground with various displays about physics is always a must-do. And now she also likes the “virtual fishtank” where you can design your own fish on a terminal and launch it into a wall-sized display with other fish. We also looked at the other small animals they keep on hand, mainly because the animal section is right next to the bathrooms on the ground level.

We managed to while away the better part of the afternoon, and she did not seem the least bit troubled by the fact that we’d been there so recently. I think parents sometimes over-emphasize the value of novelty, while children are a little too fond of seeing and doing the same things over and over. I wonder when that shift occurs in our outlook on the world.

At any rate, on our way home we had one of our usual rambling and often non-sequitur conversations. One of the things I like about Charlotte is that her picture of the world is not entirely limited to the things around her. She’s imaginative in a way that is both commonplace and far away at the same time. She’s very much interested in knowing about real things like other countries and how people lived in different periods of history rather than the princesses and make-believe that marked her imagination a couple of years ago. So our conversation in the car started with recapping the myths and legends of other countries as we had just seen them in the planetarium, and sort of followed the same path we took through the rest of the museum. Eventually we got onto the subject of breeding animals, and Charlotte said that when she grew up she wanted to raise cats. I hadn’t heard this particular preference before, so we talked about it a little more and she said that she had decided that 1) she didn’t want to get married, 2) she didn’t want to have any children, and 3) she wanted to raise lots and lots of cats.

Not many people are able to self-identify as crazy cat ladies at such a young age. I told her she could do whatever she wanted, but that she might be surprised about how her feelings could change when she got older. Nope, she assrted quite firmly, that was exactly what she was going to do. So who am I to disagree with someone so firm in their conviction? I’m 45 years old and I STILL don’t know what I want to be.

We stopped for Slurpees on the way home.