Museum Tour---Christmas 08

If you have been around our family, you know that this is one momma who likes museums. In fact, I like them a lot. I insist on taking the family along to most of them...and I like to find one 'obscure' museum everywhere we go.

Over Christmas Break, we managed to get three museums under our belts. Our obscure museum was the Weather Museum. We had a lot of fun there. It's a small museum and they are working on getting enough funding to go a lot bigger. What they had was great and all the kids enjoyed different aspects of the museum.

Rebekah liked playing with the magnetic weather board and the weather dog (who used to be on a local TV station). She spent most of her time arranging and re-arranging the magnets and coloring at the coloring table. She got to see them feed crickets to the lizards, too.

Andrew thought the tornado machine was cool, but both Andrew & Nathan had an incredible time with the green screen pretending to be weather forecasters. We discovered how difficult it really is to do this well. Everything is backwards (or a mirror image) so you have to scramble everything in your mind because left is now right and right is now left. It was much harder than I thought. We watched a dentist try and even he had difficulty. He thought it would be easy because he's working 'backwards' in every one's mouth.

By the way, check out Nathan's shirt on the computer screen. Since it was green, the map shows up on his shirt since he became the green screen.


The tornado machine in action:

We also went to a Health & Human Science Museum (aka: The Teeth Museum). You go through a body entering at the mouth.

We all liked different things here. Rebekah liked the allergy center where you try to move the pieces off the things the boy is allergic to. If you don't have them all right, when you push the button, he sneezes---loudly. Ah--ah--ah--CHOO! She just liked the sneezing and yelling God Bless You to the boy.

Andrew likes riding the bike and watching the skeleton go. He enjoys several things here, but he's old enough that he gets ahead/behind us and does his own thing. I have very few photos of him. He also had a blast (with me) looking at all the optical illusions.

Nathan seemed to like the genetics room best. There's a photo game where you match the parent with their child, some fun genetic things to look for (we can all roll our tongues--that's genetic) and a fingerprint game. We tried and tried, but unfortunately the fingerprint game was broken.

Nathan did NOT like the 4D movie. He didn't hate it, but he was having traumatic flashbacks to Disney when we thought we were going on a fairly ok ride for preschoolers. Note to self: Honey I Shrunk the Audience is not at all preschool friendly. I had two hysterical kids at that show and I may be paying for 3D/4D therapy on Nathan for years to come.

Finally, we made it to the Children's Museum. They redid the outdoor area and it no longer has a big model of a bayou where you float ducks from one end to the other. Instead, it has been replaced with "Water Works". Not sure it's any drier, but the kids had fun. They scattered in all directions and we adults sort of circled trying to see all 3 once every ten minutes or so.

The monkey girl saw the new gazebo slide and decided to give it a try. Little Miss, "I do myself" decided to climb up the block wall without help. Made the other moms nervous but I was more worried when I tried to help her and she'd turn around to tell me to go away. Here's a photo and a little video of the climbing spitfire!

Here's a fun photo of Rebekah milking the pretend cow...

All in all, I would say our museum tour was a success. Next time, we'll allow more time at the Teeth Museum because we didn't even get to see the Einstein traveling exhibit. Just ran out of time.