Friday Family Fun Days Pt. 3: Our End-Of-Summer Trips

Okay, I'm cheating a bit. Although we did visit two more museums in Tucson before the end of the summer, we visited neither of them on a Friday. Sorry about the false advertising. However, I still think they're worth lumping into my "Friday Family Fun Day" series of blog posts because they were both family trips designed to make the summer go by smoother. I rest my case. Anyway: here's a couple of museums we visited after our trip to Colorado.

"Friday" (ie, Thursday) #4: a trip to the Flandrau Center

The Flandrau Science Center is a science museum/planetarium/observatory combo, conveniently located all in one small building on the University of Arizona campus.  It's probably not the most revolutionary science center in the world, but it is the perfect size for young kids. Also, the University of Arizona has a well-regarded planetary sciences department; they have developed several space-bound devices (a Mars Rover and more than one orbital satellite). So, I figured the Flandrau Center would have fairly up-to-date information about the heavens.

Plus, planetarium! I have memories of visiting the planetarium in Denver often as a child...I never got tired of the projected starscape. I felt like I was falling into space; it was quite a rush! So, I thought I would try taking my girls to the planetarium on campus and see how they liked it.

Short answer: they had a good time, with a few reservations. Longer answer: the kids really enjoyed some of the exhibits, but had some issues with the planetarium itself. The chairs (which are angled backwards) were a little difficult for my little kids to sit in, and the show ran long for their attention span. Another unfortunate development: the awesome star projector (the giant robot-apocalypse-looking machine behind Lorelai in the above picture) was used only at the very end of the show, to show the position of the various planets in the Arizona night sky. Before that, the presentation was primarily a slideshow with detailed information on all the heavenly bodies in our solar system.

I found the show fascinating. The narrator was clearly a college student, but he really knew his stuff and had loads of information to share. The girls, however, got wiggly. Plus, poor Celeste had to go to the bathroom halfway through, and I made her wait, because Lorelai was terrified of being left in the planetarium by herself. Also, Aurora got tired and the cool, dark planetarium put her to sleep. So, I spent much of the presentation with a sleeping toddler on my lap, another preschooler chair-dancing and whining constantly in the seat next to me, and Lorelai getting annoyed with all of us two seats over. Next time, I may just bring Lorelai by herself (and hopefully pick a show that spends most of the time with the star machine turned on)!

The museum outside the planetarium was much better received:

There was a neat touch-screen quiz, a matching game of sorts with facts about various kinds of predators in the animal kingdom

And of course, the coin funnel/gravity-well simulator is always a hit with the kids

Celeste really enjoyed all the large mineral samples (aka "treasure")

There was a small exhibit about predators of the animal kingdom; apparently, Lorelai thinks she can take that shark

The small mineral hall downstairs had lots of pretty rocks; this was Lorelai's favorite

Maybe...just maybe...we'll come back to Flandrau soon. I would love to see another planetarium show. Also, the observatory is open on many evenings...it would make a really cool date night! I'll keep hoping.

"Friday" (aka Saturday) #5: visiting the Tucson Children's Museum

We've been to the Tucson Children's Museum many times before...I have never felt motivated to get a membership, though, because I'm just not sure it would be worth the cost to me. I've seen bigger, better children's museums, with better exhibits. However, the girls love this place, so I am probably just being hard-hearted.

This trip to the museum was different and surprising; they'd done a lot of remodeling since the last time I set foot there. The dark, outdated animatronic dinosaur room had been completely revamped; now it was full of lots of force/motion/wave science experiments that were all pretty fun...

...especially this contraption. It was a simple design, really; a bunch of pipes were interconnected, with air blowing quickly through them. A few levers down low on the machine controlled the flow of air, so kids could control which way a pom-pom blew through the pipes once you stuck it inside. You can see a pom-pom flying out of the uppermost tube by the ceiling in the above picture; this simple action kept children entranced for long periods of time. I think the girls spent half an hour on this machine alone!

We spent so much time at this pipe structure that I didn't get many other pictures, in fact!

We still spent some time at the older exhibits...like this heartbeat monitor...

...and the rope maze, among other things.

I hope to take the kids back to the Children's Museum at least once more before the end of the year; it will be fun to see what new stuff they come up with next! I found myself impressed, despite my earlier indifference, at the newer exhibits the museum has installed. Maybe this will be the year I change my membership from the Reid Park Zoo to the Tucson Children's Museum? Anything is possible, I suppose.

I am amazed at how many museums we crammed into such a short summer. Still, hooray for us!! Now it was time to start getting everyone ready for school.

Hot Hot Colorado Vacation 2012 Pt. 6: Our Freaky (Final) Friday in CO

Our last Friday in Colorado was a busy one, and it had its share of chills and thrills. Some were of the "ooh, deliciously creepy" type. Others were much more immediate and frightening. But, one thing at a time...

Lunchtime for lizards!!

First, the "fun creepy" stuff. We took the kids to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, as we do almost every time we're in Colorado. On this occasion, the museum had a special exhibit entitled "Lizards and Snakes." It was a celebration of our scaly brethren, and it featured a few dozen live animals. It felt more like a zoo than a museum that day!

Behold the mighty gecko and his sticky fingers! Lorelai loves geckos, because they are her school mascot!

Nathan admiring a python

The museum had a couple of gila monsters on display; here, a keeper is feeding them dead baby mice. Gross! (and awesome!)

During one kids' activity, the kids were all pretending to move along the ground like snakes (well, sort of like snakes)

WAAAAUGH! Nate's near-death encounter with a huge rubber snake

The girls didn't seem as bothered by the monstrosity. They saw it as a comfy place to rest!

Before leaving this fun exhibit, we all posed for a picture with a giant boa constrictor, so that the memory of our day with reptiles will live with us always...

We love this picture; it's pretty awesome to look like we're characters on a 50s B-movie poster! I love that everyone looks terrified except Aurora, who is loving the camera as always!

As usual, though, one exhibit wasn't enough to satisfy our museum cravings. We also went and checked out the prehistoric life exhibit...

The girls are terrified as they contemplate their physical insignificance when weighed against the mighty dinosaurs

...and the space hall/planetarium, where Celeste got her hands good and dirty doing an experiment designed to teach about water erosion.

We also did something new as a family this year: we took in an IMAX show. I went to several of these movies as a kid, and thought the kids would be impressed by the HUGE screen. They were amazed, indeed. Plus, our show was in 3D, so the girls were doubly pleased to be wearing the huge glasses. Our feature was called "To The Arctic"; it began with a snowy landscape, complete with 3D snowflakes. The girls were constantly reaching out, trying to "grab" the 3D stuff they saw and loudly talking about how awesome the movie was. So funny! (Probably not too funny for the people sitting near us, though, so we did our best to keep them quiet throughout the movie) We will probably take them to another IMAX show again sometime; it was a great way to cap off our visit to the museum this year.

Okay, now to explain the "actually terrifying" scary part of the day. Thankfully, it's a very small part! After resting up from our museum trip, we drove into the foothills to visit Nathan's sister Kelli, her husband Taryn, and their four cute little boys. Kelli and Taryn have a large house that sits on several wooded acres, and it takes our breath away every time we visit. They provided a large dinner for us, then showed off some of the improvements they've made to their home since we last visited, including this lovely wooden deck!

Nathan with our nephew Myles--he's Lorelai's age

The girls had lots of fun climbing the hills in the backyard, checking out the view, swinging on the swings by the garage, and playing with their cousins. Lorelai also borrowed her cousin Myles's bike, and was zipping around the property. However, at one point, she turned onto the driveway leading up to the house...

...and started speeding downhill. As you can see, this is a pretty long, rough, steep driveway, and Lorelai was going pretty fast. She rarely rides her bike on hills (she usually drives on our flat street), so she quickly lost control. Here's what the bottom of this hill looks like:

Nice view--but that DROP...

Kelli's driveway has two 90-degree turns as it heads up the hill towards her house. At the corner of the highest 90-degree turn is this 30-foot drop-off, which is not only directly adjacent to a busy highway, but which has some metal rebar sticking up out of the ground at the bottom. And Lorelai was speeding on a bike towards this drop-off, out of control, with nothing but a few wooden posts to break her fall.

Nathan and I both took off down the hill after her, screaming for her to crash the bike, or at least to leap off of it. Still, the whole thing felt like it was in slow motion; I realized deep inside that if something awful were to happen, I wouldn't be in time to stop it. I guess Lorelai was being watched over on that day. With just feet to spare, she managed to slow her momentum enough to tip over and "crash" the bike. She was shaking, wide-eyed, and scraped up, but luckily, that was the extent of the damage. Nathan and I were unhurt physically, but we will be having nightmares about those few scary seconds for a long time to come!

Lorelai wiped out at approximately the spot where the large white rock is sitting...too close for comfort!

Lorelai, being the resilient girl she is, didn't take too long to recover from her brush with disaster. She was kind of tense for a while, but by the end of our trip, she was climbing up that same huge hill--using a rope--with her cousin Braiden. She loved climbing the hill so much, she barely wanted to stop for dinner! I guess her inner daredevil wasn't totally quashed.

Look at that kid climb!

After that, our evening went well. We got to see most of Nathan's siblings who made it up at some point during the trip (sorry, again, that I didn't get many family pictures...I was either contemplating my child's doom, or chatting with people I don't see often. My bad!). It was a nice conclusion to our lovely Colorado vacation. I am not sure when we will next make it back...but this particular trip has given us lots of trip ideas to try for next time! I am also very grateful for my parents, Ray & Lori Nash, for letting us stay in their home for so long (and almost destroying it with our mess), and being generally awesome parents and grandparents. We're glad were able to see all of Nathan's siblings; we had fun together and enjoyed catching up. Hopefully we will see more of them later in the year. Now, it's time to start blogging about Arizona once again, and wrap up our summer!

Hot Hot Colorado Vacation 2012 Pt. 5: In Which We Visit Blake Street, Home Of The Rockies

Tucson, Arizona, is a pretty big town--more than half a million people call it home (and I'm including our little suburb of Sahuarita in that tally). Denver, Colorado, where I hail from, is a bigger town (600,000+, with over two and a half million in the total metropolitan area). Besides the numbers, though, Denver has always felt like a much bigger city to me...and a big reason for that is their proliferation of professional sports teams.

Denver has pro sports teams in all of the Big Four (football, basketball, baseball, hockey), as well as a pro soccer team, many college teams, and many other club or semi-pro teams. And people are generally nuts over most to all of them. Tucson, in comparison, isn't much of a sports town at all. Sure, there is a dedicated minority who are big fans of the University of Arizona Wildcat teams (mostly men's basketball and football), but the rest? Eh...nobody seems to notice or care. Major League Baseball spring training used to have a presence in town...until low ticket sales meant the teams took their business elsewhere. The minor league teams who are here barely cause a ripple. And...that's about it!

Pro sports followings here in Tucson are almost always imported...people who move to Arizona generally bring their fandoms with them (lots of Packers/Steelers/Bears fans in the retirement communities, for example). Nobody seems to care about the Cardinals or the Diamondbacks or the Suns (or heaven forbid, the Coyotes...pro hockey is a poor fit in our part of the country) since those teams are way up there in Phoenix, you know?

So it's refreshing to take a trip back to Colorado once in a while, where pro sports fans are plentiful, and sports teams have a strong following! Even though I haven't lived full-time in Colorado for years, I still keep an eye on their sports teams every season, cheering them on from afar. I am a huge Broncos fan, for example, but while I was growing up, I was able to see lots of Denver Nuggets games, too. I also caught a single, glorious Avalanche games. Some of my more enjoyable spectator experiences, however, were at several Colorado Rockies games, played in beautiful Coors Field downtown on Blake Street.

Nathan and I thought it would be fun to take the girls downtown and have a tour of the Colorado Rockies' home ballpark. And to make it even more enjoyable, we thought we'd take the light-rail train all the way downtown from Aurora (the Nine Mile station is only a few miles from my parent's house). We saw the whole day as a fun opportunity to explore the city and get a little walking in as well.

The girls, as we suspected, were very excited to take a ride on the train. They were overjoyed and grinned for ear to ear the whole way downtown--probably to the amusement of the other passengers. If we ever do this again, I wonder if the novelty will wear off? In any case, it was fun to watch them take it all in!

The girls are amazed at the "big blue bear" sculpture, which is peering into the windows of the Denver Convention Center

Once we got downtown, we walked several blocks down the 16th Street Mall, another downtown Denver landmark. Basically, it's a long pedestrian mall with hundreds of shops and restaurants. It also occasionally has some avant garde sculpture or paint spring up from nowhere...

...like these oddly painted steel buffalo.

The girls were a little tired by the time we got to the ballpark, but they had some time to sit and rest before we went inside. It turned out to be a pretty hot day (the story of our vacation this year!), but luckily a large portion of the tour was indoors. Yay for air conditioning!

Here are some of the highlights:

From up in the nosebleeds...still, a beautiful view

The girls were impressed at the size of the park

This Statue of Liberty was a gift from the New York Yankees; they gave a specially painted Lady Liberty to every MLB team!

Nate and Aurora in one of the corporate suites

A mini-museum dealing with the history of bringing pro baseball to Denver

Rockies-themed Mickey Mouse!

Jerseys of former & current baseball teams in Denver

Aurora and Nathan loving the press box

Kind of hard to see...on the walls inside the press box are several indentations, from stray fly balls that zipped through the windows during games!

The girls inside the visitor's training room

I'm outside the Rockies' home locker room; too bad we weren't allowed in!

The family near home plate (we weren't allowed on the pristine grass; we're standing just on the edge of it)

Nathan in the home team dugout

After bidding Coors Field farewell, we returned to the 16th Street Mall. At this point, we decided to drop by a favorite bookstore of ours: the Tattered Cover Book Store, a multistory, sprawling independent bookstore that's been a Denver staple for years. It's true that you can often buy books cheaper online; however, there's something exciting and magical to Nathan and I about wandering randomly through a bookstore, seeing what surprises might await us on the shelves.

going up the stairs in the Tattered Cover (it's about 4 stories high!)

Lorelai relaxing in the children's reading area

Celeste meeting Babar the elephant, whose wife in the books is also named Celeste! True love!

We let each girl pick out a book for herself; then, we took some time to read, sightsee, browse, and (especially in Aurora's case), rest from all our walking...

Aurora finally succumbed to the heat and exhaustion, and probably won't remember much of the Tattered Cover as a result. Oh well, we'll always have this picture of her to prove that she was there.

After we each selected a book, we got a quick lunch elsewhere along the Mall (a Red Robin-style burger joint), then headed back to the light-rail stop for our journey back to Grandma's house...

Despite the heat of the day, we really had a great time. Maybe next time we're in Colorado, we can take a tour of the Pepsi Center (home of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche), or even Sports Authority Field at Mile High (aka, Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos play). That would make this pro sports fan one happy lady.