A Robotic Mother's Day

It was left to me to choose our outing for Mother's Day. I almost chose going to the San Francisco Giant's game, but only my mom and I really enjoy baseball. All the menfolks who would be accompanying us would undoubtedly appreciate something else.

So I started looking up museums, and nothing in SF was too intriguing (although I'm psyched to see that Frida Kahlo and Dale Chiluly will have major shows this summer), and I thought to look at the San Jose Museum of Art. They were advertising an exhibit of Robot art, and hey Target was sponsoring the weekend, so it was free. Mom (and I) love a freebie, so that was the choice. Plus, less gas required than a drive up to SF.
The boys glommed onto the lego station and made some cool robot creations. You can see in the background behind Alex the gigantic robot banner. Photos weren't allowed but I got a special okay from the guard to take pics of the boys' robots. There were even some embroidered robots, but most were of harder material. The museum is trying a new thing and offer an iTouch to check out and take a video tour of the exhibit. It was cool, had interviews with the curator and the artist, showed more of the artists' work, etc. I thought it was a great innovation.

Then it was time for lunch at the yummy museum cafe. It was such a nice day we sat outside and waited. And twirled our number, that would be number twenty three. Paninni sandwiches all around.Here is Alex and my mom at the museum entrance. Note she is wearing the Mother's Day badge I made for her back in 1978 when the junior high school acquired one of those badge maker thingies. I was obsessed with that thing and spent a lot of my money to make them. 50cents apiece!That's my dad in the red shirt, I was far away on the museum steps using the zoom to capture him, as well as Zach and Marc. But somehow he sensed the camera. And froze. And started grinning. The other two were oblivious because they were distracted by the Happy Birthday Buddha celebration going on in the nearby plaza. The people were very nice and explained stuff to us, as all of the signs were in Chinese, it was a lovely display of Buddha related artwork, with flowers.
Zach doesn't go anywhere without this little guitar. Here he is practicing busking in front of the Fairmont.
One of the unsettling things about downtown San Jose is the flight path of the landing airplanes for the nearby airport. It goes right overhead, and since the airport is so close, the planes come in very low. I always think that the planes look like they're about to crash into the tall hotel buildings. Yikes!
Some city sculpture we found interesting. Alex tried really hard to tip them over (dont' they look tip-able?!) but they didn't budge. Somewhere in here we went to Ben & Jerry's and got tanked up on high-calorie delicious ice cream. But I was too sticky and sugar buzzed to take any pictures. But I did discover that there is an ice cream in this world that is too chocolatey for me, their Chocolate Therapy. Huh, how about that!
And on the way home, we had to stop at Guitar Showcase as Zach had broken a string on his guitar. It has a huge selection of guitars (duh!), keyboards, and drums. We were there for an hour fooling around on all the instruments, and watching him play $2,000 guitars. eeeek!

So, that was my Mother's Day, fun going out with the family, seeing art, eating good food and just being together. Perfect. Hope yours was good as well!