Montshire Museum

This vacation of mine is turning into a veritable tour around the state! Today's destination was the Montshire Museum. We've been there many times before, and Aisling and I even slept over there last year with some girl scouts. It's a fantastic place, and I wish we lived closer to it. It's about a 2 hour drive away, so we only head there a few times a year. They have a fantastic outdoor water exploration section, so we generally go there in the summer. Today the biggers slept until 9:00 (!!!) and I did not want to wake them, given their behavior yesterday... so we had a late start. We still had a blast, however.

We started the day with a picnic. (Yes, I actually packed food today, not Subway!) They have great outdoor trails and tons of places to sit and eat. They've never sold food there before (and there's nothing really close) although new this year was a food cart. Dad was still up visiting.
This museum is right in the middle of the trip from MA to VT,
so it's a great meeting spot too!Once inside, the kids hit one of their favorite places within the museum, the fog machine. They have little blocks and things with the machine, so you can move the path of the fog. Siobhan, probably having no idea what fog was, felt certain that we were going to see "frogs". She spent at least ten minutes of our fog playing asking me where the frogs were!(I'm having a really hard time with how grown up Aisling looks in this picture...)

Connor and Aisling learned a little about evaporation,
as they tried to spread fog to everyone below them.
It didn't quite work!The fog machine is right near the "tower" which rewards your climb with views like this
of the "science park" below.
Next up was playing in the robot garden, where giant robot bugs gave the kids
some perspective on a bug's life.
This is the kids putting pieces together to make a platypus.
How bad of a parent am I if the first thing Siobhan said was "It's just like Perry?"Perry:

Hey, it's a good show. Don't judge.

They were then able to head to Siobhan's favorite place, the bubble zone!

Then they did some exploring with aluminum foil to try to build boats that would hold the most pennies. They learned about surface tension. They had a blast with this and tried a few different ways to build their boats. I have a feeling this may be replicated at home. Connor's record for the number of pennies held was 168. Aisling's was 100 something, and Siobhan lost interest after about 50.

Finally it was time to head out for the true favorite part, the water exploration park! This is a long stream which includes places for the kids to look at damming, currents, and fountains, among other things. The stream ends in a little water fall. There are ping pong balls that the kids can drop into the stream to explore what happens at various places and under various conditions. There is also a place where the kids can build their own fountains using little pieces of PVC pipe. There is also a little area where the kids can climb on the rocks and in and out of the water. They can control the speed of the fountains here and can play in little pools of water. They can also play with the ping pong balls here, and can also experiment with blocks to change the water path. All around excellent water play!
This child keeps me on my toes in unbelievable ways.
Good thing I love him so gosh darn much!

I'm having a great time home with the kids. I head back to work next week. I haven't worked over the summer since college, so I am having some mixed emotions. I LOVE my job, and am excited to go back to it, honestly. I am also quite happy to take a break from being camp director/nurse/teacher/fight manager/art teacher for four kids all day every day. That's exhausting. It's fan-freakin-tastic, but so exhausting. I know the kids will have a blast at the camps we've picked out for them too. But, of course, they are feeling a little nervous about it as well. Thankfully, I will have Fridays off. A decent mix I think.