To celebrate Noah’s second birthday, we started on Friday with a trip to Brookings. Bill and I took the day off to spend it was the kids and the weather was going to be beautiful! We decided to start the birthday weekend in Brookings and visit the new Children’s Museum of South Dakota. I had heard lots of good things about it, which didn’t do the place justice!
The first exhibit we explored had to do with produce and the marketplace. First the kids got to pick vegetables such as carrots, pumpkins, corn, potatoes and tomatoes.
When they filled their carts or wheelbarrows as full as they’d go, it was off to the conveyor belt. The hard vegetables had a little metal tab, which stuck to the bottom of the magnetic conveyor belt…
… and carried them up into the air where they hit stoppers and dropped into a sorting bin.
Then it was up to the kids to pull them back out and sort them. The sorting bin showed their color, shape and size to help them along and the front end, which you can’t see in the left of the picture, opened to a play supermarket complete with registers, beeping scanners and fake food galore.
And when I looked down at my watch, I realized we had been playing on the farm for about an hour! It was time to move onto something else… THIS was something else!
The ultimate jungle gym, right? Alexis got the hang of it right away and jetted to the very top. We were stunned! She isn’t a heights person, but this didn’t seem to bother her at all. Noah had some troubles. He just wasn’t quite big enough to be able to climb from level to level. The gaps were just a little too big.
That’s the view from the top, and not even the very top. The balcony behind the climbing clouds didn’t take you THAT high.
Now it was time to really fly through some of the other areas… we were getting hungry already! We found the water room, which was a giant water table with water guns and puzzles.
The air compressor pumps which help the balls fly into the traps in the ceiling weren’t working. So, Bill had to lift Noah up with them so he could watch them travel down the water tunnels on the wall.
We also flew through the music room (don’t know how much of the noise I could have taken anyway), the art room (no painting today), the cafe and post office, and the TV studio.
Then it was time to step outside to see the… DINOSAUR!
The pictures don’t do it justice. It moves, it roars, it scares the bejeezes out of Alexis. But No-Fear Noah was all about checking them out! So while Noah climbed on the railing, pointed and gawked in amazement, Alexis stood back and let him take it all in.
He’s not kissing the tree stump, I promise. He’s just trying to climb up on it.
Lunchtime in Brookings means just one thing: Cubby’s! It’s the sports bar where Bill, Nate and I had lunch after lunch in college. They have great burgers (which now come in half sizes, thank goodness!) and these jalapeno raspberry wings that are awesome! It was only fitting that we found a booth with a Twins bat hanging above it. A perfect ending to a fabulous morning!
Oh, Alexis was pretty amazed too that there were televisions in the bathroom… and black toilets. Details, details.