Children's Museum of Houston

Includes excerpts from Guest bloggers: Brynna and Spencer (via their journals transcribed by Mom)

Biggest news of the day: Skylar finished his reading lessons this morning. Party tonight!

Because of our Evergreen Museum pass, we were able to check out the Children's Museum today for free as part of the reciprocal program.

Bryn's journal:
"Today was so cool! We did school and in the middle of school, Heidi peed on Mom and Dad's bed so we had to do laundry.

After that was over, we finished up school and drove about 40 minutes to the Children's Museum of Houston.

First we got stickers and a kids' card (kind of like a credit card). Then we went into a room with a machine that sucked up balls and shot them across the room to the other side of the machine. (via a track system mounted on the ceiling)

Vintage Pedal Cars mounted on the walls

How Things Work - Pulleys

Telephone Man

How thing work - Mustang

Spencer lights up the town with pedal power.

Use positive and negative wires to power different devices

Then we went into a Nanotech room and learned about that.

We then made this cotton ball shooter/catcher with masking tape, a balloon, and two little clear plastic cups. It looks like this.

 Spencer's journal has more detail on this: "...how you make them is...cut the bottom of each cup then take a balloon and cut the bottom off of it. Then stretch the balloon over the cup's mouth. Then tape the cups together. Drop a cotton ball in and pull back the balloon and let go." 

After shooting and trying to catch a cotton ball several times, we moved on and left our poppers with dad who was working in the cafe area.

We went outside in a courtyard kind of thing and played with this huge water works structure; it was really cool! My favoirte water thing was they had these locks for boats so you could see how real locks work.

Through trial and error Bryn & Spence figure out how locks work.

Seriously studying cause and effect

Crazy with the water flow

After that, we went into a place called Kidtropolis where you pick a job and go to work. There was a vet, a restaurant, a grocery store, voting box, a UPS post office, and a bank, etc. We spent about 45 minutes in Kidtropolis and then went into a fitness type area that had a bunch of activities to get your heart rate up."

Spence's journal:
"...they had an awesome! town that you could run the store and there is a photo booth that really works with the fake money that you earn for doing a job."

Brighton as waiter, chef, and dishwasher at a restaurant.

Working and shopping at the grocery store. Workers collected a "paycheck" to cash in at the "bank" for money. Kids used the "credit card" type card they'd received when we'd arrived at the museum at the ATM machines which actually scanned the cards and allowed the kids to deposit their cash to an account and it tracked their balance.

Sky as cashier-the bar code scanners really worked or you touched the screen to select items

A diner at Bri's restaurant.

Trip up your brain and try to say the name of the color used to write the words rather than actually reading the words. Not difficult, but your brain sure slows down trying to do it...

Fun house style mirrors

Fishing

 After the children's museum, we headed to the Galleria Mall. A huge mall that we didn't even see half of. We did visit the Lego store and all the kids chose to get at least one minifigure and some got up to four.

After that, we headed for our big splurge, the party celebrating Sky's reading prowess, dinner at The Cheesecake Factory.

Had to put 3 pics together to get a semi decent one of most of us. Brock snapped the pics.

Brynna said her caesar salad was the best she's ever had. Spence had a chopped vegetable salad with pomegranate vinegrette. Brock has shrimp scampi and steak diane. Bri had fettucine alfredo. I had bang bang chicken and shrimp, which had yummy Thai peanut, curry and toasted coconut. Sky had 2 sliders with cheese and a side of fries, off the kid's menu. We were all stuffed, but still split a slice of key lime cheesecake before we headed out. (Thanks to Grams and Gramps for padding our "fun fund" so we could have such an opulent celebration!) :O)

We closed the mall down at 9 pm and as Brynna wrote in her journal, "it was 10:30 pm before we all got into bed."