Today was the kind of day where your sweat sweats. The kind of day where you walk around with a coat of grime and you deal with it because well- what else can you do?
Find some A/C, that’s what. Of course, with the kids I also needed a way to keep them busy. Bored kids are a difficult beast to deal with. Leave them alone for too long and they will almost certainly get into trouble of some sort. Creativity knows no bounds. So it was off to the Children’s Museum- where there is plenty to keep them going for the afternoon. Most importantly, though, they have A/C.
We’d been there before and both kids remembered it. The entry area is the spot with the most interesting things to do. They have a water area with a bunch of handpumps hooked into pipes that the kids can alter and reconfigure to experiment with making the water do different things. The boy had a lot of fun here- I actually had to go a get him to move along after about a half-hour because the daughter was bored there.
So we moved on to the next area which had a bunch of different activities. They had a wall with magnetic track that could be strung together for a ball to roll down. The boy decided he was going to make a circular track. I decided not to mention any of the physics principles he’d be violating if successful. It worked for Wile E Coyote, right? The daughter spent her time between several different spots- the giant light-brite, the lite-up lego area, as well as checking up on what big brother is doing. There was also an area where they could send handkerchiefs through pressurized pipes. Great stuff- they particularly enjoyed stuffing all of the handkershiefs at once in so that the eventual ejection of the wad of ‘kerchiefs resulted in a shower of material. There seemed to be no limit to the joy provided by that particular spectacle.
The second floor has several building block type activities, and a bunch of playset areas. The kids spent most of their time on the sail boat playset, pretending to steer the ship and what not. There was also a little vegetable market thing complete with a scale and cash register. The daughter was fun to watch here- she parked herself in front of the cash register and other kids would bring their vegetables up to her and she would wring them out. She even “scanned” the vegetables and gave the people there change. The boy was more interested in figuring out how much stuff the scale could hold.
Then it was time to go. The air quality had not improved at all outside but we were all in a good mood. They’d had fun and made sure that I would bring them back again. I had enjoyed the A/C. It was a win for everyone.