Cincinnati Museum

Someone on the Cincinnati homebirth email list had extra free tickets to the Cincinnati Museum Center, so I decided to give it a shot in taking the children there for an afternoon. It is about an hour drive for us from where we live in the boonies (I REALLY wish we lived closer to the city sometimes!), plus traffic, plus getting lost, but we made it. We wandered around the natural history area briefly. I was glad that Sean has been watching Dinosaur Train on PBS, so he was interested in something besides things that have wheels!

I did not take any photos of the dinosaur stuff, but I did see a box full of hissing cockroaches. This just made my skin crawl. I try to be tough for being a girl, but when it comes to bugs I just can't handle it! EWW! In fact even looking at this picture now is giving me the willies....

Then we ventured on to the children's area. We found this place with plastic balls everywhere, and there were several ways to get them up high into a bin that periodically emptied onto whoever was standing under it. Sean thought this was hilarious. We didn't see much else of the museum after this, he was so intrigued by this whole thing. He ran back and forth to the different stations, getting balls in the bin, then when the bell sounded to warn that the bin was about to dump, he and all the other children would run as fast as possible to stand right under it. It was very cute!

The smaller, dark tube you see here had a vacuum motor attached to it at the top, so you could just hold a ball at the opening and it would get sucked up into the bin at the top.

This white tube blew out air, so the point here was to steer the floating ball into the metal basket, then another contraption took it up to the bin.

Teresa was too small to enter the ball area, so I hung out with her on the outside. She practiced some crawling and tried to eat little things off the floor - you know, the usual stuff.

We had a good time, but I don't know if it was worth the drive with two little ones. I guess to most people it's not a big deal to drive an hour, but when you work at home, driving longer than 15 minutes is nearly unbearable!