Fun at the Tucson Children's Museum

We had to send this Thanksgiving weekend out in style! (Nate's actually taken more time off for Thanksgiving than he will be able to take at Christmastime, due to his still-accumulating PTO at his new job). So, we decided to take the kids to one of their favorite places...the Tucson Children's Museum. It didn't hurt that we had a free pass for four people, so the fun was all "on the house"!


We've never had a membership at the Children's Museum, but we've still visited it several times this year, since this is their 25th anniversary and they've been having several promotions for that. Overall, it's a decent enough children's museum; I've certainly seen better, but what's important is that the kids love it, and it's a decent way to kill an afternoon (especially if it happens to be really hot outside!)

Here are a few things the girls liked best on this trip:

There's a "bug floor" which projects various types of creepy crawlies onto the ground, and kids have to feed them & identify them as facts about them appear on a wall monitor. However, most often, the kids just like to stamp their feet on the "bugs" and watch them "scatter" away. Our girls get a kick out of it!

There's also a projector which records your shadow and plays it back on a neon-checkerboard wall. Sometimes it can be disorienting, but whenever Lorelai finds the silly dance she was just doing repeated in one of the squares, she always gets very pleased with herself. (By the way, that is Lorelai in that picture; she's just dancing extra hard so you may not be able to tell!)

There were also all the usual attractions the kids have come to love: dinosaurs; laser-light walls; a miniature train; an art table; a musical instrument room; a play "grocery store"; a fire engine & police motorcycle; and more! However, there were a couple of new additions as well on Saturday; the grocery store was reduced in size, and much of it was replaced with this mini-orchard:

The fruits are all magnetized, which meant you could hang them from the trees and then pluck them off again! You could also choose which kind of fruit tree you wanted to create, from the comfort of your own tree-house!

I thought it was a very cute exhibit, but the kids seemed a bit underwhelmed; I think they missed some of the old exhibits in that room (there used to be a green-screen wall to create music videos, and a climbing wall as well). The "doctor's office" was also gone, replaced by these alarmingly large facial features...

...complete with boogers!! Gross. I couldn't resist looking deep within these jaws, only to have this giant mouth yodel at me when it sensed I was inside!!

I guess we all acted pretty childish on Saturday. But hey...I'd been holiday shopping the whole morning, and it was good to just sit back & watch the kids go crazy! Today, though, reality (in the form of school, piano lessons, exercise, Nate's job) has reasserted itself...along with a desire to string Christmas lights. We'll see if I survive either one of those.