July 8 at the Museum

Tuesday:  It's just one day before Dylan and Kelly leave town, and they have a lot of "prep" ahead of them for their trip, along with working longer hours at work; so I volunteered (!!) to show up today at noon and take the kiddos to the Grand Rapids Public Museum for the afternoon. They have a "family" membership, which very nicely includes me as the grandma. I haven't been inside the public museum (other than a few short minutes last month when I was picking Brendan up from photography camp) in YEARS. I actually love it there. It's not that I am a huge museum fan--you know, the type that reads every single signage describing each museum piece ... but I do love to learn about history, especially local history. But truthfully, the real reason I have loved the museum is because of the special children's exhibits they do every year. This year, they totally knocked themselves out with catering to children.

Look at this AMAZING LEGO exhibit! And my FAVORITE theme too!!!! Everything that is built here: lighthouses, marina, sea animals, big and small ships, harbors ... was WOW.

I liked the lighthouses (TWO of them) the best. Are you surprised?

Look at these amazing ships! I can't figure out if they are mimicking cruise ships or if these are millionaire yachts ... but I love these!

There are little islands, wave runners, turtles, sharks, dolphins, speed boats, cabin cruisers, and even a cargo freighter (that I missed taking a photo of).

Here is Erin driving the horse & trolly along the brick pavement of early Grand Rapids ...

Aidan was avoiding my camera and kept turning his head away so that I would only get the back of his head ... however, every now and then I did catch him out!

Here is Aidan fooling with the mechanism on the rear of the trolley care ... I wonder if he is trying to figure out just how it used to work.

We let Brendan choose where to go next since he had been at the museum, I think, four half days just a few weeks ago. I asked him to choose the next floor; so he ran up the stairs to the 2nd floor. The children ran too. Guess who wasn't running up the 43 stairs to the 2nd floor? 

We stood by a window overlooking the Grand River for a few minutes to catch our breath ... I'm not sure what Brendan is finding so amusing ...

We wandered around the 2nd floor for quite awhile. Room after room kept adjoining each other with more fun stuff to look at and TO DO ...

This place was kind of the entrance to the "Changing Gallery" that showed textiles, etc. THIS room, however, was demonstrating how many pieces of clothing the average person throws away in one year's time. I object! I have NEVER in my life thrown out this much clothing. I have donated some to clothing centers, or passed them on to family ... but I DO NOT throw clothing away. Evidently, some people do!

What we liked about it, though, was that two walls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors ...

I would have loved to play right here for a much longer time--Erin was really into changing the outfits on these two "mannequins" -- you could do the upper part of the outfit and then the bottom part, and there were all kinds of choices you could make. The boys could not have cared less about outfits ...

We went out to a larger area that had LARGE versions of some of our favorite games. "Tetris" is a favorite of Erin's! Actually, we all like this game very much; but the super sized CHESS set kind of dominated our play time ...

Cal is super INTO Chess right now. So he and Aidan had a game of it right here at the museum. How fun! Of course, since Cal is still learning the game, Aidan quite easily won.

We had tickets to see the show at the Planetarium at 2pm, so we did that. It was super interesting about the stars and planets in our solar system. The kiddos did really well during the wait and all through the 45 minute "show."

Look at the LEGO display from peering down at it from the 2nd floor balcony!

We then walked into another area where there was a tree house and a puppet theatre, I think this was adjacent to the SHARK exhibit--which, for some reason, I took zero photos of ... anyway, the kiddos enjoyed playing with puppets and climbing up and down, in and out of, the tree house for quite awhile.

Before we knew it, it was after 3:00 and our stomachs were growling for a treat ... so I talked the kids OUT of the museum, slowly but surely (although when I mentioned that we needed DONUTS, that hurried them up a lot) back to the first floor ... we did a quick sweep of the "Curiosity Shop" without purchasing so much as ONE item, and then went back to the car.

We ended up stopping in at "Crispy Cream Donuts" over on the Beltline and ate way too many donuts at that time of day! I can't believe it, but I have zero pictures of our time there! 

It sure was a fun afternoon, though, and the children all did really well together and with me. They were good listeners, were sparse on complaints (yay!), and I felt we had a worthwhile few hours together.