An Hour at the Museum

You can read the beginning of our story here – explains why we only had an hour at the museum.

So we’ll jump back in time just a bit to fill in the blanks, and share some of our experiences of the day:

Part of why we took the trip we did was for this – riding a real train. We had a lot of time to waste, so we thought we’d visit this:

Ball Building - up close and personal)

Aiden has a thing for tall monuments (Eiffel Tower, Washington Monument, Reunion Tower). So we found the tunnel to go under the train platform to get to the ball building and went through this:

There were no signs from the top that we were about to enter a demolition zone, and we were fully committed to getting Aiden as close to the ball building as possible, so there was no turning back. We did ask the workers if it was okay to pass, and they all said yes. Honestly…with what was coming at the museum, I felt I was getting a teeny tiny hint of what it might have been like walking through NYC on Sept 11. The tiniest…but it was on my mind.

The tower had been open for a brief time last year, but after some damage (from a storm I think it was?) it was closed for renovations. We’d driven by this one every week for the summer a few years ago, and Aiden wants to go in so badly, but we can’t. Wolfgang Puck’s 560 restaurant is open, but we weren’t dressed appropriately to even try to think about having an appetizer at the bar. So this was as close as we could get him.

And we’re off.

We’ll skip the part about Ft. Worth and it’s lack of good public transportation information and get right to the hour at the museum we had. We did have a light $40 lunch of stuff that wasn’t half bad, so that was an extra 20 min in the museum I’m not counting…

The first exhibit at the museum is the beam from the World Trade Center that will become part of their permanent collection. At first it’s just some steel beam in the lobby. But it really doesn’t take long to sink in that what you’re looking at was once part of the 110th floor of WTC I, and  now a crumbled mess.

We moved on to the few other exhibits that we could fit in..it was a race through the museum to try to get as much in without flitting and touching upon everything and experiencing nothing.

This may have been Connor’s favorite part – creating a tornado. There was a little disk that helped control the airflow and you could make the tornado come to life if you could get the airflow right. Of course, most of the kids just wanted to play with the smoke which just made Connor frustrated beyond belief! He’s usually pretty easy going, so we giggled at his reaction..he just wanted to make a tornado – is that too much to ask??!

From tornado created to spinmaster….moving from one spinning element to another…good thing he didn’t throw up! This next area was a mishmash of science set up mostly to let the kids ‘play’ without really teaching them anything. Sure, it was fun, but I doubt any of the kids could come away with any real scientific knowledge or idea of how these forces/theories played into their everyday life. I’m sure it’s hard for museums to balance the need for connection to knowledge with attention spans formed from Spongebob Squarepants, and this day wasn’t the day to expect scientific enlightenment (so crowded for the free museum day), but I was pretty disappointed that it has become more of a playground than anything.

Aiden was pretty confused by this. In a world where museums are ‘no-touchy’ zones…being allowed to touch a fossil just seemed wrong. But once he started touching, we had a hard time getting him to stop!

My try at a panoramic view of this dino didn’t work out, so this is the best I could do…a really big dino. I REALLY think Aiden thought this guy was going to come to life once the museum shut down. And he was a little scared of that.

This was cool..and the 6yo in me squealed at the concept – a giant Lite Brite.

This was also from the light room – again…just a room full of toys that looked funky under black light. The one really cool concept was a giant kaleidoscope that I wish we’d gone back to get  a picture of the boys in…it was pretty cool.

We coudn’t have fit an IMAX movie in if we’d tried, and there were more displays and activities that we had to skip in order to make an effort to get back to the bus to get to our train to get to our rail train and make it home in time. We did have a schedule to keep, after all – Dr. Who was coming on  Dr. Who was only half the reason..the other half was that if we’d missed this train, we probably wouldn’t have been home til 10, and we were so done with it.

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