Thanks to my generous friend Yulia,we were able to spend the night of December 28th in Chandler, Arizona, in a cozy warm apartment. The girls shared a bed, Aurora cuddled up with several blankets in a crib, and Nathan and I got comfortable on a memory foam mattress...*sigh of contentment*. The next morning, we were ready to have some fun in Phoenix before heading home.
And oh what fun we had! We decided to visit the Arizona Science Center, a science museum of which we'd heard good word, for the first time ever. Luckily, we had recently purchased a membership with a partnering museum, so we would get into this museum for free! I had heard rumors there would be real, honest-to-goodness snow at the Science Center that week, so we decided to pay them a visit and find out...
...and we weren't disappointed! I'm not quite sure where it came from (the staff alluded to "buying" it from people who apparently "make" snow for a living), but there was a nice little snowdrift on the museum's front lawn when we arrived at the museum just as it was opening for business.
As you can imagine, our girls (and every other kid in the vicinity) was going nuts over the snow.
The background kids were even making a snowman...and another kid brought a sled!
We ended up staying outside a lot longer than expected...it was tough to pull the kids away from the snow! But we finally made it inside, to check out the cool Lego creations...
...and then head down the cavernous main hall...
...and finally, before going through the main gate, checking out the giant floating microscope with an eyeball staring at us (hint: the "eyeball" was Aurora's; she was peering into a matching super-microscope nearby). We liked the design of this place, and were excited to see the rest of the building.
Can I just say how much fun this museum was for everybody? So, after getting cold and wet from the snow, our first stop was the outdoor courtyard with all these cool water experiments. So then our kids got super-wet all over again. This time, Nathan and I got wet, too!
Nathan got really involved in creating this water-pipe sculpture-fountain thingy
In the summer, I am sure this is a nice refreshing area for everyone, what with all the water splashing around. It was still really fun, but it was a chilly day, so we were pretty cold after playing there!
To warm up, we headed back inside and played with a bunch of Legos...
...and then moved on ahead to check out the "human body" portion of the museum. The little girls loved crawling around in a giant stomach (ew!)
...and Lorelai loved this interactive board. There's an "unadorned" diagram of a human body on the tabletop, but when you move the special panel across the body, it "reveals" the various body systems, depending on what settings you enter (digestive, circulatory, etc.)
There was also this balanced bike that older kids could ride through the air on a tightrope. Lorelai was old enough to go, but she refused...I can't blame her! It looked pretty high up to me, too!
Here's a rotating drum with guitar strings in front. Hard to tell by the picture, but the interweaving moving lines reveal the shape of the vibrating guitar strings...basically, you can "see" the sound-waves. Cool!
The next room we found dealt with various kinds of force and energy...it might have been our favorite. The girls could have stayed in this room for hours!
Haul the wheels up the groove...
...let them roll down the slope...
...and then start it all over again! Yay...it never gets dull!
Celeste on the centrifugal force machine
Lorelai in a pulley "tug of war"
Mama, trying to pull her fat self up using only her own strength
Each of us took a turn lying on the retractable "bed of nails"...for the record, it was fairly comfy!
We found another cool room upstairs that had lots of displays about weather. The highlight was an interactive platform that re-created natural disasters in miniature.
Standing atop this platform, you'd alternately get sizzled by heat lamps
(for "volcano eruptions" or "heat waves"), blasted by wind (for
"tornados" and "hurricanes"), get damp from actual "rainfall" (for
"hurricanes" and "monsoons"), get blinded by strobe lights (for
"lightning"), and even have the ground beneath your feet rumble and
shake (for "earthquakes" and "volcanoes").
The program ran every several minutes, and there were a lot of visitors who just kept jumping back on that platform and getting blasted by all the intense "weather" over and over again...including Celeste and Aurora. Lorelai, with her huge imagination, was actually pretty scared of it...I think she was imagining an actual hurricane sweeping us all away.
She felt better after a few minutes, though, when she wandered off to try out some other experiments!
After a long but very fun visit, we bid the Science Center a reluctant farewell. On the way out, we checked out the snowdrift. This being Phoenix (where a day in the 60s is considered "cold"), the snow level was sadly depleted...
Before...
...and after.
Since it was just a few days after Christmas, some of the museum volunteers were holding a "fruitcake launch" outside as well, complete with catapults! Funny stuff.
All that science made us hungry, so on the way out of town we stopped by a restaurant Nathan had heard a lot about and wanted to try. It's a Texas-style barbecue joint called Rudy's.
The interior was pretty no-frills (everyone sat on benches at cheap tables, for instance), and you are served food by the half-pound, poured out on butcher paper, for you to divide the spoils with whomever you see fit. And the food. Ooooh...the food...
Yes, the presentation is poor, but trust me...this is great stuff!
I am not a huge barbecue fan normally...I enjoy it, but don't seek it out (in fact, I've come to prefer the "Mexican-style BBQ" to the "Texas-style" since moving to Arizona). However, maybe that's just because I haven't had Texas barbecue done right before. And now, thanks to Rudy's, I have seen the light. There was not one thing I ate there that was bad.
Yes, we devoured everything so quickly that all I could photograph was the greasy aftermath! Well, except for their ridiculously yummy creamed corn, because we ordered a lot of it...
For the record, we bought a half-pound each of pulled pork, moist brisket, sausage, and spare ribs. None of it survived long! Besides the corn, we also bought some potato salad and green chili stew, which was surprisingly my favorite item! I could have slurped that stew down all day! Maybe if I were to visit in the summer, it would be less appealing, but in the winter it really hit the spot.
The kids seemed to enjoy it too! Suffice it to say, we will definitely be returning sometime later!
After our filling meal, we piled into the car and headed for home. It had been a great weekend...not only were we able to discover some cool new places in Phoenix, but we had a great time visiting the temple and having some spiritual uplift as well. On to 2013!
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