Hotel CaliFarnsworth

Wow! It has been a LONG time since I have blogged! I will try to catch up this week! I'm sorry. Hopefully you will enjoy the coming posts!

First things first. On November 11th, the kids had a day off of school. Veterans Day. I didn't want to just sit at home with them but I didn't want to spend a lot of money either. So I did some google-ing and found out that the California Science Center is FREE and open on Holidays! YES!
The museum looked pretty cool on the internet and with only parking to pay for I decided that was how we would spend our day. The very first hands on thing we came too the kids LOVED. It was outside! They had a lever with a truck attached to it. Kids could pull on rope at different points on the lever and lift the truck. My 3 little ones could lift the truck all by themselves on the rope listed as "Effort x1". They felt strong like Superman!Once I actually got my kids inside the museum they were excited to find this contraption.This little Whisper Tunnel was so much fun for them they played with it for quite awhile. Just when I thought I had convinced them to go into one of the rooms (we were still just in the hallway) this kind youth came up to us and put on a Science show for the kids. My kids thought she was magical.She was really nice and even did her many "tricks" four of five times for my kids. Once inside the first gallery, Preston, Chloe, and Derek got to do many cool things. They got to rock out:
meet robots:
experience recycling: participate in experiments (isn't Chloe so cute all decked out nerdy-like--hee hee): keep their chemical reaction experiments (Chloe HAD to keep hat she made. It was the hard foam they make boogie boards out of): check out hearts and brains from various animals, (the octopus brain was the most unexpected for me):
play puppets: meet skeletons: pump blood for a giraffe (and other animals, including a human girl): and enjoy the rose gardens. I thought we were done when we discovered that the museum actually has a couple of buildings. We decided since we had some time we'd check out the Space Building too. So glad we did! Preston LOVED it! Preston about peed his pants with excitement when he saw this: "the Great Bird. Mom it's the Great Bird by Leonardo Da Vinci" Preston was in heaven. He even got to fly a Wright brothers plane using a simulator: I will spare you all the pictures I took of the real Apollo that I took. I was fascinated. It was so cool to look at. The kids got to fly a real police helicopter too. Okay, they got to sit in it and push all the buttons and pull all the levers. Derek liked the real astronaut suits they had on display. One of my kids favorite things in this building was the wing room. Each child would put on some airplane wings on their arms (they were foam) then stand on this silver plate on the ground. Wind would push at you and cause your foam arms to fly. So funny! Here is Chloe with her foam airplane arms. The museum was so much fun. I am sure we will make this a yearly visit. We were there for hours and did not see everything. In particular they have a show that I really wanted to see so we will be back for sure. On the way to the car the kids found this bike rack to be loads of fun. Thank you California ScienCenter!