Recent field trips

Over Labor Day weekend we went to the Garden State Discovery Museum, a children's museum in Cherry Hill, NJ. The tired Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia closed September 1st as it prepares to move to its new spectacular location in Memorial Hall; PTM will reopen in mid-October, and as an aside, we're going to the opening gala. In the meantime, while the PTM is closed, the Cherry Hill museum is offering free admission to its members. The Cherry Hill museum is great for young kids, and we'll definitely go back. The first attraction that you see when you walk in is a boat from which you can "fish" from the bow, an activity that surprisingly held Bryn's interest for 20 minutes. Luke, on the other hand, couldn't pull himself away from the large light-bright board.Bryn's favorite exhibit, hands down, was the kid-scaled replica of a Silver Diner. Ken sat on a stool at the counter, and Bryn gave him a menu, took his order, and then went back into the kitchen and prepared everything! No wonder they were there for a good half an hour while Luke and I explored the rest of the museum, which includes a construction site, the studio of a local news station, and a cave in which you can listen to the sounds that insects and nocturnal animals make.

In our never-ending quest to find interesting things to do with the kids, Ken took Bryn and Luke the following weekend to the Philadelphia Insectarium. The "bug museum" was started by a Philadelphia exterminator who used to display his daily catch in his office window. When the catch drew a crowd, he decided to open the insectarium on the top floors of his office building in northeast Philly. Ken said the museum is very tired; the carpet looks as though it hasn't been changed in 25 years. The museum features an apartment kitchen, enclosed in glass, that's infested with cockroaches. Gross. [Ken to fill in more about what the kids liked about the bug museum...] Ken said the museum provided for a fine Saturday-morning activity, but there's no reason to make a return trip.

Last weekend we went to the Franklin Institute to see the pirate exhibit. Ken and I both enjoyed the exhibit, which followed the true story of Sam Bellamy and his sunken ship -- and treasure chest, circa 1717 -- that were recovered off the coast of Cape Cod, but as we had expected, Bryn and Luke are too young for the science museum. I suspect, however, that it will be a more common destination when B&L are a little older. While at the Franklin Institute, we did walk through the giant model heart, and we rode the enormous locomotive, the Baldwin 60000, that was so big when it was constructed in 1926 that it bent the tracks on which it ran. To get the engine into the museum, which bought the locomotive for $1 in 1933, a wall of the museum had to be dismantled.

Finally, last Monday I took the kids to the Morris Arboretum to see the garden railway, which includes 250 feet of track over a quarter mile. I thought the garden railway was really impressive -- several trains run simultaneously past architectural wonders of the world (e.g., the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Maachu Picchu), all of which were constructed entirely from bark, leaves, seeds, sap, and other materials found in nature. But even an impressive railway can hold a young child's interest for only so long, so our entire visit lasted only 45 minutes, and I'm afraid there's not enough at the arboretum to warrant a return trip any time soon.

[More forthcoming about 1) peach picking with Bryn; 2) Luke's talking; and 3) Bryn's writing and drawing....]