The Children's Museum

Santa gave Harrison a membership to the Children's Museum for Christmas, and we've gone 4 or 5 times now. It's a great indoor alternative to the zoo -- especially while the weather is cold and rainy or once it's scorching this summer. The museum has about 20 different stations of stuff to do, and we usually end up with a fairly standard route...

First stop : The car track. There are two or three tables (at different heights) with tracks going all over and little wooden cars to drive. Harrison loves the ones that you can stick end-to-end with magnets and pull like a train.

Next stop : The balls. You can sort them by color and send them through pressurized PVC pipes and drop them into buckets and scoop them back up with the crane. It looks like Harrison might be mis-sorting the green ball below, but really he's taking it out of the red bucket so he can relocate it to the green one. :)

Next stop : The tractor. Always a line at this attraction. The kids can climb up into the tractor seat and "drive," but I don't have a photo of that because it was just the two of us the day I took this picture and I was afraid he'd fall out of the seat if I left him alone up there!

Next stop : The grocery. The grocery delivery truck isn't nearly as popular as the tractor for some reason, so we always get plenty of time here. The competition for a shopping cart or a basket, however, is intense!

Driving the grocery delivery truck.

Holding his own in the crowd

Next stop : The kitchen (after the grocery, of course!). Toddler-sized refrigerators / freezers / ovens / stoves / tables! It's our little sous chef's paradise!

Cooking some baked beans and chocolate spread

Adjusting the setting on the oven

Feasting on some sauteed pineapple and other random stuff

Next stop : The moonsand. This feels like soft, wet sand and is supposed to by hypoallergenic, not spread germs, and not stick to hands/shoes. I'm still not going to get any for the house, though. There are lots of different shaped molds and tools for working in the sand. I think that Grandmom and Harrison are working on a pizza here?

Next stop : The fishing hole. The museum provides little raincoats, and the kids just splash around in the fishing ponds. There are fishing poles with magnets for hooks, and sometimes Harrison gets lucky and "hooks" a fish with his magnet. Mostly, though, he likes to pour water from bucket to bucket and collect the rubber sharks that float around in the water.

Next stop : The reading room. Everybody needs some downtime...

Next stop : The computers. He showed his Grandmom how to do it!

Next stop : The music table. You place the wooden balls in the little divots on the table, then spin the crank on the side of the table to roll balls to the side. When the reach the edge, the fall onto different lengths of metal to make different sounds. There's a music book with instructions on how to arrange the balls to make tunes you recognize, but we're not there just yet...

Next stop : The (really bad) live show. I don't have anything nice to say about this, so I won't say anything. ;)

And by this point we're all tired and hungry (except for the day that Grandmom went with us and treated Harrison to some "chichen" nuggets from the Chick Fil A stand inside -- oh, yeah!), so we eat some cheese sticks and drink some milk in the car on the way home and then do naps. :)