Since our anniversary was on a weekday, we spent most of our celebrating on Saturday. It was a great day, spent with my favorite person! We got up, went for a run, showered and left. It was pretty much an all day extravaganza. Loved it.
We tried a new place for breakfast that one of my clients eats at every Saturday. It's just a fun little mom and pop place downtown Kent and has a very small town feel to it. We even got to watch the short order cook. Kind of fun! Until I saw the size of the pancakes, then I got nervous. Holy crap those things were big! I only got through a little over one of mine (I ordered two). It was super good though!
From there we went to the music store to price out drum stuff and dorked around there for a while, one of Aaron's favorite places. Then it was off to Seattle. We did the bodies exhibit that we have heard so much about, ate a supper yummy dinner at Cheesecake Factory and then took off to watch PNB Sleeping Beauty. Aaron had never been to a ballet before so we gave it a try.
It was a great day, and I enjoyed myself a lot! What better person to spend the day with.
Happy Anniversary Aaron!!
(Below I will tell you of our experience if you feel like reading them. It's pretty long though, so I am putting it after in case people don't want to
Bodies. How can I explain this exhibit and the feelings that I had when I was there? Horrified, fascinated, humbled, mortal...... I'm not sure ethically how I stand on this one.
For those of you who may not know, Bodies is an exhibit of the, well, body. It is made to sound like it's an educational exhibit to help people understand the body and all of it's different functioning parts. The catch is, they use real bodies. All bodies are bought from a company in China who plasticizes unclaimed bodies after they die.
When I first walked in I was extremely nervous about being there. I knew going in I was probably going to have a hard time with this, but Jeff had to go for anatomy class and thought it was fascinating and Aaron has been wanting to check it out ever since. We started out with a section on the arms and legs. I was doing great with the skeletal system. They are just bones and easy to distance yourself from, in thinking they are actually from someone. We then went to a display that had an entire arm and leg without the skin. I got a little light headed, I'm not going to lie. It was very interesting to look at, and I found it somewhat fascinating, until I saw the fingernails. That did it. Too real! I am wondering if it's because muscles, bones, tendons - those are all things on the inside of the body that you just don't see, so it's not real, but fingernails. I see those every day.
After being there for a while I started to acclimate myself and it wasn't as bad. It was just once in a while when you would see eyebrows or eyelashes that it once again reminded you that this is REAL. These were real people once. People with feelings and dreams and... well lives.
They had displays of every system in the body. Muscular, skeletal, nervous, reproductive - everything. It's is quite amazing that they were able to extract all of the different systems and get them by themselves. The most amazing was the blood vesicles. You can see from the picture above that they have the lungs, but it is just the blood vesicles. Nothing else. It was beautiful and amazing at the same time. They had one tank with the entire body, vesicle only. You could make out the lungs, kidneys, liver and all of the places that blood is concentrated. Fascinating.
I have to admit my favorite part of the exhibit was the gestation area. This was blocked off and separated with a warning sign before you went in. The sign did say that non of the babies were aborted by choice and all were as a result of complications with the baby or the mother, but it is still quite controversial and a lot of people get upset by it. They had little tubes with babies at all stages of gestation. Every week from 5 weeks until 30 weeks. Do you know that at 5 weeks you can see a little tiny mouth and eyes and limbs?! That is when you can detect a heart beat as well. The thing that was SO amazing is how much a fetus will change and develop in just one week!! Holy cow! By the time the baby is 7 weeks along you can see little fingers and toes. I was so totally fascinated.
All in all, I will not go to this again. I have a hard time with this exhibit ethically, especially now that I have been there and have seen it. It is sad enough that these people didn't have anyone in the last moments of their lives and no one to claim them. It's even sadder that someone is profiting off of it. These were all someone's child, a person. Who's to say what their circumstances were. To capitalize on that just seems wrong.
Pacific Northwest Ballet's Sleeping Beauty. I have only been to one ballet in my lifetime and that was the Nutcracker. Love the music! Love the ballet! So, I was excited to go and see Sleeping Beauty. We already know the story, so I thought it would be a good one to go to as it would be easier to follow. Aaron was a little excited as well since he has never been to a ballet before.
I don't think Aaron was super impressed and I was disappointed. It seemed like they took this simple story and made it too long with unnecessary dancing. It seemed like most of the time, instead of telling a story, they were just flitting around on stage. There were a few beautiful and fun scenes, when they were actually deep into story telling, and we both really enjoyed those. The rest was just fluff that we didn't enjoy. I don't know if I could get him to go to another ballet or not now. Nutcracker is so much better! But, at least he has been and knows for sure he doesn't like it.
