It never fails when we go to a museum, the boys MUST go into the gift shop! Isn't that true of every child out there?! We've learned most shops have the usual gear -- tee shirts, magnets, bumper stickers, pencils, books, and so forth. We try to steer clear of that stuff. Our house is full  of enough of all of that already. IF we find something cool that directly reflects the museum we are at, then we will buy it if we can afford to pay cash for it. The only thing we seem to purchase lately are books about North Carolina lore. We could probably do without more books in our house but we like to read AND we like owning books about places we've lived. On our recent trip to The Wright Brothers Memorial we found another item to buy: The Wright Brothers Flyer.

The flyer cost a bit more money than we would regularly spend on an item at a museum BUT we figured we could use it as a school project. Jesse, especially, is interested in aeronautics so we could take multiple lessons from putting the flyer together, and studying things such as lift and the engineering aspects of flying.