For some reason we skip the camera for some of my favorite little moments (going to Dunkin' Donuts, playing with Nana Rose and G-Daddy at the house) but we often have it for some of our excursions, so we'll show you a bit of that. There are passes you can sign out at the libraries here that let you in free to area activities, and Nana and G-Daddy collected several for us. We used them to go to the Children's Museum, and then the next day to go to the Arizona Science Center.
Here's Elena turning a magnetic wheel and turning on the fan and lights to her left.
In this section they focused on mechanics, and here we found that even if you are very strong, you're not going to be on the winning end of this tug-of-war if your end of the rope is closest to the fulcrum.
Elena could pull her own weight entirely up this pole while using a pulley!
Steve exhibits that you can lie on a bed of nails, providing that all the nails are simultaneously supporting your body at the same level and dispersing your weight around.
Elena had to touch and make sure the nails had retracted before Steve got up!
Both girls said that their favorite thing at the entire museum was this "turn-y guy" that let them witness centripetal force.
Climbing (but we can't really remember what this taught us - something to do with your weight and gravity).
We're also not sure what we learned from this particular display, but if you went behind a screen the "balls" (light beams) would collect about you in really cool ways!
This was one of Christina's favorite displays - the little pins that let you make an imprint of your hand represented the way that information/images can be displayed with high resolution, and the one made up of large screws illustrated low resolution - low tech but cool!
In the "body" room there were all kinds of anatomical lessons - the favorite was this one about the nose and sneezing. Steve and Elena did it first, and Elena freaked out but then found it cool upon reflection, and came to get Christina to show her "sumfin really cool!" and Christina then freaked out and upon reflection showed it to Clara! It's hard to describe why it would really surprise you so much - you are supposed to throw balls in the nose (representing foreign bodies/irritants) and then without any warning at all, a huge blast of wind blows in your face, blows the balls with a great deal of force right at you, and makes a super loud noise! It seems like you should anticipate that, and I think we all did, but it just seems like it will be on a smaller scale than it ends up being!
Wheelchair races (Clara won this round, Elena won a round against Steve).
As we were leaving the museum there was this cool telescope - although it lets you see out just like a normal telescope, there is a camera capturing the image of your eye and it is displayed above on a screen in a similar telescope - it was so fun to play with! Here's Clara's eye:
Elena's eye:
Steve's eye:
Christina's eye:
And then sweet (and backed up) Steve and Elena:
When we got home we made a gingerbread train Nana got for the girls - it teetered and tottered but didn't fall down!
We wrapped up the day with a boat ride around the lakes surrounding Rose and Steve's house to see the lights.
It was a really busy day, but so very fun, and we all slept hard afterwards! Vacation is good for that (both fun and sleep).
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