I still haven't been keen on the idea of sending Evan to camp even for a week for summer. It is nice having every day to choose to do what we wish in summer. I really don't like summer in and of itself, heat, humidity, bugs, but I do like the free time and the long days we have to enjoy.
We went to a friend's get together and the kids had a lot of fun. Evan shocked us all by getting into the bounce house and hopping around. In his 4.5 years he has never been keen on bounce houses or any nebulous surface.
The temperature was about 98 degrees and the bounce house was a sauna but the kids played in it for hours.
The next day was Father's Day so for the first time we decided to go to the Durham Life and Science Museum. The Museum was built with children as their focus and almost every exhibit is interactive. We spent several hours there having a blast.
We started off with a train ride that goes around the museum property. We want to go back later this summer because they were just finishing up work on a new dinosaur exhibit and you will be able to ride past life-size moving dinosaurs.
The landscaping of the museum is very pretty taking advantage of native plants and wildflowers.
We went down to the butterfly building next, which is basically a large greenhouse with butterflies floating freely through the air.
There were giant insect exhibits as well with the giant hissing roaches and huge claw faced beetles, scorpians, all kinds of wretched insects which I was happy were separated from me by thick glass. They also had a huge clear -tubed fire ant colony. Drew was quite concerned.
A poisonous frog.
We walked along a boardwalk that winds through a swampy lake area and we were able to see some black bears being fed in their enclosure. The enclosure was quite huge with caves, rivers and waterfalls. The bears tussled a bit as well over the food being tossed to them.
The kids really loved the interactive water pressure contraptions where you pump and water pours out of various pipes down channels into buckets or spurting out of some nozzle.
There were outdoor panels of drums and cymbals, cowbells and all manner of cacophonic fun.
Inside they have exhibits about space travel and various other geologic interests. The weather exhibits were a lot of fun with the opportunity to swirl and create hurricanes and tornadoes.
The kids didn't want anything to do with the tornado.
There was also an exhibit which had a grid on the floor and as the kids ran through different grid zones different instruments played so you could get quite a song going the more children were in the grid and the faster they ran around.
This exhibit had a wall where flowing purple dots would collect on your shadow and you could actually hold your arms out and your shadow arms would collect these little dots, and then you could even whoosh your collection up in the air and the dots would fly up and down as if you were actually tossing them up. Amazing!
