The Hankens Leave the House–Day Two

If you missed it, check out my previous post about our vacation that we took this summer. The kids are finally old enough to go do something fun and actually get something out of it, but at an age where they are pretty content with just a new change of scenery. One of the places that I have heard great things about is the Iowa Children’s Museum in Iowa City (Home – Iowa Children’s Museum). And boy did they have a good time! At first I was a little worried that it might be a little “young” for Georgia to get much out of it, but she was able to find something fun to do (and something she could boss the boys about) at each station.

This section was “skateboard” themed. They had skateboards with different textures on the bottom to experiment how they went down a ramp you can see in the background. They had the wooden rails you can see above that Eli is using to see how far he could get his ball to go. Emmett was mad because Eli was using the piece he wanted and he was NOT interested in waiting. We have been having lots of talks about waiting for turns and trying to understand that while you may want something, the other person wants it too and while you don’t want to wait, they also are entitled to a turn as well. It has been going over like a lead balloon. And then they usually follow with the traditional, “I know that you hate me,” or “You don’t even love me.” It’s been a fun summer–I was totally ready for them to go back to school.

Here is Georgia in another section of the skateboard room doing a similar activity to Eli, however the ones she was using were all magnetic and stuck to the wall.

As you can see, Emmett perked up after the previous issue with the rails in the skateboard room. This was in one of the building rooms. I really liked that they had things in the room that all had the same theme, but materials and activities for all kids of ages. In this room they had lots of legos, duplos, and wooden blocks of many sizes to build with. Emmett chose the blue foam pieces to make himself a little house.

Overall, everyone’s favorite station was the art room! They had this cool area where you could paint on the window and then use a squeegee to clean it off. I think they probably played this for a good 30 minutes or so and would probably played longer if we would have let them. They had another area in the art room where they had guided activities that you could do, or you could just create whatever you wanted. I broke out my elementary art skills and made them oragami paper cranes and I was able to gain a little bit of mom clout back, which was much needed.

On the upper level, they had an alphabet display. They would have things themed by the letter and then all kinds of activities, events, or just things that started with that letter. We found the Titanic for T, so of course we had to take a picture to show to Gannon.

Eli found a couple of cool “N” and “O” things as we walked through as well.

The boys really liked the aerospace exhibit when we first walked in! At this part, one of the things you could do was take scarves and put them in this chute that would blow them around through tubes. They had fun putting them in the different chutes and then seeing where they would come out. They had a few flight simulators that they boys had far too much fun purposely running into the ground as well. They also enjoyed making rockets and then stomping on a blaster to get it to shoot up and see who could get theirs up the furthest.

After a few hours at the museum, we made our way over to the food court that was nice and close to grab a late lunch. Then we had to make a quick trip over to bath and body works as I promised Georgia she could get a few new hand sanitizers. Lucky for her, they also had a Claire’s that she wanted to visit. I told the kids that they could pick out one thing after seeing the prices and seeing how all of the things they wanted were licensed items, thus not on sale and atleast $20.00. Lucky for me, they had knock off squishys in three different colors and each of them picked one for a total of $25.00–never thought I’d get out of there under that!

We called it a day and headed back to our hotel which conveniently was pretty close to the mall. Whoever planned this trip should definitely be complimented on that (good work Kelli)! This hotel was much nicer although it didn’t have a water park. The kids thought it was pretty neat that we were right next to the pool and that it had a hot tub they could go in. We went swimming, took a little break, and then ordered Applebee’s which was very underwhelming. Everyone got a good night’s sleep in and we were ready for Day 3! Stay tuned!