Thanksgiving Point - Museum of Curiosity

On Friday, June 26, Lily wanted to play with her cousin Madeline.  So after an appointment at Fotofly, we headed over to their house and down to Thanksgiving Point to check out the Museum of Curiosity. 

Upon arriving at this museum it reminded me of Winston-Salem's Children's Museum... but about ten times bigger!  As soon as we got to the entrance two buses pulled up and dumped off about 70 children aged 7 to 14.  It crowded the museum, and made it hard for our cute little toddlers to get the interaction and play with things in this museum.  It seemed like they had to wait in line to enter any room and were constantly being bumped by older kids. I felt so bad because I knew how bad they wanted to play, but with so many older children it made it more of an obstacle to get the interaction or "curiosity" out of them that toddlers need. No one's fault except for the museum's for allowing such older aged kids to dominate the play space. 

Regardless, I felt like there were a lot of activities where we got lucky and no one seemed to be interested in them at the time.  Take for example the green room.  We had so much fun pretending to be in the jungle with Dinosaurs or in the deep ocean swimming away from sharks.

And these cool little doors were placed all over the museum.  I bet there were about 20 of them (and Lily only found a handful), but you could lift open the door and see what it was hiding.  It was a little game just for them since they are little people and notice things like that better than us adults who are always too busy rushing from one activity to the next.

In addition to music, green room, and hide-and-seek doors, we found a dancing room and a "comparison room."  In the comparison room you could stand atop a scale and it would compare your weight to jaguars, hippos, or grasshoppers.  Or you could jump and see how high you jump in comparison to various animals.  There were about ten different comparison stations, each with different elements of comparison - no two being alike.  

But I think that the girls very favorite room was the room where you could go shopping for fake food and put it in your basket.  You could then weigh all the food - and it was all proportional. For example, if you had a coconut, you could put the coconut on the scale and see how many limes equaled the weight of one coconut.  While that interested, me - the girls were more interested in seeing who could put more fruit and veggies in their basket - and then how many times they could put the fruits and veggies back in the wrong spots!  They felt so important being able to go "shopping" all on their own.  They just loved this station that it almost convinced me to make felt fruit. (Almost, but not quite!)

After we were done, we were going to head to the petting zoo, but everyone was hungry so we decided to fill up our bellies with some yummy food from Zupas.  While we had every intention of going to the petting zoo, kids had a different idea - it was called NAPS.  

So we headed back to Aunt Bridgett's house to feed Marco and go home for naps. 

Thanks Aunt Bridgett and Cousin Madeline for inviting us over to play with you.  We sure loved spending time with you and seeing how cool Thanksgiving Point was!  We can't wait to go back and check it out some more!  In fact, Lily misses you so much, every night in her prayers she prays for "Bidge-it" and "Mad-din".  She loves her cousin, and I love that she has someone to play with that loves the same kinds of things that she does!