Children's Museum

On Saturday morning we took Nicholas downtown to the children's museum. We had pondered getting a membership and had a buy one-get one free coupon, so figured we'd try it out first. Nicholas had a lot of fun, but we decided against the membership. The coolest features of the museum are things for the 5-10 age set. If he was home with one of us all winter, then it would be a different story, but with only 1 day a week for outings, it just didn't seem like it would be in the rotation enough to be worth it.

Anyway, so what did he do with his morning?

He played soccer with Mom.

From 2010 December

Actually, first he played with a little girl who was there, although she wasn't big on sharing and was older and so could beat him to the ball each time. She'd kick it, he'd get all excited and chase after it and she'd get there first and kick it away again. Luckily just as he was starting to get discouraged that family moved on and he and I were able to play. (And I'm at least a little better at sharing.) The "soccer ball" was inflatable, making it lighter and easier to kick, and Nicholas actually did a surprisingly good job. (There is a really short video here.)

He also played in a train, which had a button to push to get it to whistle.

From 2010 December

But his favorite part of the train was that the front was a tunnel. He would have been happy just going back and forth through the tunnel the whole morning.

From 2010 December

And once again he absolutely stunned us with his problem solving skills when he figured out that he needed to pull his legs in front of him, sit down, and scoot out on his butt at the end rather than just reaching out for help getting off the ledge.

He also worked on decorating a gingerbread square, although he mostly found it torture because we wouldn't let him eat the candy. When we looked at our watches we realized not only had he missed his morning snack but it was already the time he eats lunch at school. No wonder he was upset.

From 2010 December

But Nicholas' favorite part of all (despite the expression in this picture) was the room with water play and a big bubble you could pull up around you. He wasn't so sure about being inside the bubble the first couple times, but then he decided it was awesome. Of course, about a minute after he had this realization, a bunch of other kids came over who hadn't had a turn yet and so we had to stop.

From 2010 December

All in all, a fun time, but except for the water play area, I don't know that it offers him much more than Storyville does. If we didn't have such an amazing public library system, it would be more worth going to the museum.
There are more new pictures in the Gallery, including some random videos from the last couple weeks that we may or may not get around to individually blogging about.