Day off from school: MSI!

Last summer, when we went to the Museum of Science and Industry, the only way we got the kids to agree to leave, was to promise them we would go back on their first day off of school. That fell on last Friday, and we were true to our word. (Since we have a membership this year, we can go back all we want to!)

We started the day by spending some time in the "Idea Factory," a hands-on room for kids with all sorts of things to play and experiment with. There is a river with balls floating on it; you can send the balls "up-river" through a pneumatic tube, and splash them; you can spray water and work propellers, and see how river locks work, and play with pulleys, and scales, and gears, and conveyor belts, and refraction, and it was fun!

Then we went and checked out Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle. That is one of my favorite things, and I always try to at least walk around the room, even if I don't stay for the whole audio explanation.

After that we went to the show on the digestive system. C helped make the presentation on the small intestine. It's 22 feet long!

There was a new OmniMax show, so we got (free!) tickets for that: a train trip across the Canadian Rockies. Here are DD2, and C & P waiting for the show to start.

C requested this picture. I love the expressions!

We had a quick, good lunch, and then kept on going. We checked out the hatching chicks:

We had our fingerprints taken, and discovered that P, DD2, and I all have arched finger prints; only 5% of the population has that pattern. C has whorls and loops; those are also the more rare patterns.

P got to calculate the flight path of an airplane from Chicago to Buffalo. He stuck with it, and flew the shortest route!

One of the exhibits P wanted to visit was the You! exhibit, all about the body. Here are P & C filling the wall with their shadow outlines. Both of them got to walk on the "hamster wheel" and discovered that it takes quite a bit of effort.

We also went down another long hallway with one exhibit after another: Networld, the earth revealed (different satellite pictures of the earth, projected on a globe, very beautiful), the whisper gallery, and a whole area on imaging which was also a lot of fun.

Next week, a new Dr. Seuss exhibit is opening, and during the holidays there is an exhibit on all the different Christmas trees from around the world. We will be back!