Eric Carle Museum

Every now and then I become that parent who feels as if I'm not doing an adequate job of showing my children the world. Not really the world, but something other than the walls of our house. I feel like we are at home all the time. We go to Target and the grocery store, but I'm quite sure that they aren't getting a lot of enhancement out of those activities. When these moments of realization strike me I tend to act impulsively and pack them up and take them somewhere new. If I think too much about it, I find a reason that it's probably not a great idea to go to whatever place I'm thinking at this particular time. Tuesday was one of those days when I thought, "we've never been to the Eric Carle Museum and it's so close to where we live. Maybe that's what we could do today". Well, we didn't go on Tuesday, but we did make it there yesterday. What a great place for kids! Even Maggie was happy because she could crawl around in almost every area. The kids were really excited about going and were not disappointed at all. 

The Museum

One of the highlights of the day for Braeden was the puppet show where they did The Emperors New Clothes. I saw the first few minutes, but Maggie wasn't having it and Evan was having trouble sitting still too, so we went outside to the beautiful grassy patio area while Braeden stayed for the show with Jean, Abbie and Abbie's kids. 

Maggie loved being able to crawl all over the grass

Evan posed with the big red elephant

Once the show was over, everyone else came out and joined us for a few minutes of picture taking with the elephant, snacking, and hanging out in the beautiful weather. 

The girls

My boys 

(I don't think I can even bribe Evan to look at a camera for a picture)

The museum is really great because it is so kid friendly and most of it is hands-on. There are two galleries of art, but the rest consists of an auditorium (where the puppet show was), an art studio, library, and gift shop. 

Our next stop was the art studio. This weeks project was creating an animal out of shapes. Every child was given a piece of paper and a large shape to use as the body of their animal and then they could create whatever they wanted. There are lots of fun paper supplies available as well as markers, glue and scissors. 

Serious animal creators

Braeden working on his giraffe

Evan using lots and lots of glue to make a lion

While Abbie's kids continued to work diligently on their projects, I took my three down the hall to the library to read some books and play. The library has lots of books and toys that are age appropriate for all of my kids so we planted ourselves there for quite a while. Before we went in, I tried to get a picture of the three of them in front of the big caterpillar. As usual, Evan wasn't overly cooperative, but you can see a glimpse of him jumping from bench to bench inside of the caterpillar. He was very proud of his success. 

We hung out in the library until it closed, much to the disappointment of all of the kids. There was 15 minutes left until the museum closed so we headed to the gift shop to see if there was anything we had to have. The kids were so good and each picked out one thing they wanted. Our "Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you See?" book even came with a poster. I love a bonus!

I feel like a broken record when I say how grateful I am to have such wonderful people surrounding us, but I don't think I can ever express enough how much I love having amazing family and friends to spend time with and do such fun things. I'm sure we'll all be together again soon on another adventure. I can't wait.