Visit to the Children's Museum of Houston

Natalie, Eric, and I made a short trip to Houston this past weekend. We had not seen my parents since June plus this was going to be the last free weekend for a while.

We used to be members of the Children's Museum of Houston when we lived there. Anthony even used to take some of the classes they offered for kids and we have many fond memories from our visits there. It's been years since we've gone and I wanted Eric to experience what a great place this is/was.

The first picture is a display of "nano-size" magnetic particles and how they behave differently from larger particles. Eric and I both thought it was pretty cool how the particles looked "like the sun" when they were near a magnet.

They also had this big funnel that the kids could throw a ball into. The ball would spiral down into the hole at the bottom, going faster as it got to the bottom. Eric made an interesting comment. He's been learning about the planets in school, and he said that this was like planets going into a black hole. I thought at that point, "Eric is going to be a science geek." That's not too much of a stretch, considering his father and older siblings, but still, it was interesting to see him so excited about science.

I took the second picture in the puzzle area. They had different puzzles, from trying to build a bridge using only wooden planks to a matching game to this life-size puzzle where you had to fit the pieces together to form a cube. As you can see, we didn't solve it. I would have tried some more but he seemed content to sit on it and he wanted a picture, so I took one.

They had the museum decorated for Halloween. In fact, they had some sort of Trick or Treat activity where they had stations throughout the museum where people were giving out candy. I didn't choose to look into that at all since just being at my Mom's house meant that the Eric was getting plenty of treats.

They had this big poster with a mummy-looking creature on it. They had some small mummy-wrapped figures nearby also. I asked Eric to stand in front of the poster for a picture. He decided to stand on one leg and look like a monster. He was having a blast!

Near the poster they had a station where you could fold a piece of paper (the blue paper that he is holding). There was a shaft in the middle of the table where air was being blown upward. You could put your folded piece of paper on top of the air shaft and the paper would go flying up and around--very cool. I took a video that I can't seem to post here on the blog. There was another station where you could build a structure out of blocks then you could turn on the wind storm to try to blow it down and/or you could crank the handle to create an earthquake to knock it down.

Here is Eric again posing for the camera next to another Halloween-themed display. There were a ton of kids there, as I'm sure there are on most Saturdays. We were still able to play with the things we wanted to play with, although I texted Patrick with a comment about how I remembered the one thing I hated about the Children's Museum--kids who were unsupervised, even if their parents were standing right next to them. When I was building a bridge out of the wooden planks over a "river", a girl came up and started taking the extra pieces and throwing them all into the river. I didn't feel like I needed to be the one to tell her not to do that with her father standing right next to her looking at what she was doing. Eventually of course she knocked down my bridge and at that point I didn't think it was worth it for me to continue building. Her father didn't say a word or made any motion toward her. Sigh.

There was a new area that wasn't there a few years ago during our last visit. It was a play area with different active things for the kids to do. Eric's favorite activity was this big play structure made out of circular platforms placed at odd angles to each other with all of them encased in netting. The whole thing was three stories tall. It was sometimes tough for me to be able to see him despite going up and down the stairs. He stopped to look for me a few times, smiling and waving, and posing for a picture.

There were lots of other things we saw and did. In all we spent about three hours there. Natalie stayed at my parents' house with her cousins. They were watching something on Emily's iPad when I left. They would have had fun if they had gone along, but frankly, I only had energy for one and I was happy that I could devote all my attention to my sweet little man.