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Port Discovery

Saints preserve us! After two days of struggling with collages and slide shows, I wasn't sure I would ever post this! Well... because of the SMALL size I'm limited to on this blog, collages were out of the question... but the video (though it would be better larger too) is good... now that I've finally got it made and THINK it may even upload and be a productive part of this post ... though that remains to be seen... let's get ON with this story!

Our day at Port Discovery was absolutely positively AWESOME! It was NOTHING what I thought it would be... much more playful, and much LESS museumish! Guess that's why it's a CHILDREN'S museum - though I've been to others that have still been much more museumish!

When you walk in to PD the first thing you see is a huuuuuuuuuge 3 story playground! It is THE center attraction of the whole building and it can be gotten into and out of on all 3 stories! Very worrisome actually to a by self Nana with 4 wiggly wandery kids! And I did actually lose a couple of them during the day... but the place is such that even when they're lost, they mostly don't THINK they are, and if you can just hang on to 3 of them, eventually you spot the 4th one and a reunion is arranged! Only ONE ended up in tears - and that was right at the beginning - before they figured out the ins and outs of it all. Eventually they all thought I was nuts and that they should just be allowed to run off and do whatever they wanted and I should just sit tight and wait for them... but that WASN'T happening!!! ROFL!


I decided our best strategy was to stick together and tackle this place ONE floor at a time!!! We started on the bottom - cuz that's where we were - and worked our way around and up... starting in a cool little play area that had a kid sized, but REAL grocery store set up, with checkouts and scanners and a freezer section and scales. The works! And right next to it was a gas station with a REAL car - a little green volkswagon - that the kids could drive if they only had a key... and an air pump to fill the tires, and an ATM machine that gave play money! Pretty darned cool! The kids liked it a lot - but it was verrrrrry crowded and so we moved on to the Chagall art exhibit!


Chagall was awesome! Every single exhibit had hands on SOMEthing for the kids to do. And each exhibit also had a phone the kids could listen to a description about that particular piece of work. In the one above the boys were taking a rubbing. In another the girls were arranging flowers. Yet another - Paris Through The Window - had magnetic portions where they could actually change the view that one saw through the window! And in my favorite they actually became part of the artwork! There was about a dozen different things... it was very neat!


One display area was Egyptian... it had a lot of cool stuff too! When you entered the area the first thing to catch the children's eye is a raft to get you over the river (the Nile, I'm assuming)... they had to have strong muscles to pull themselves (and the raft) across. There were also stepping stones to hop across ... but they appeared to be in the sand! LOL! There were all sorts of very sturdy recreations of pottery and tools that the ancient Egyptians used - and absolutely everything is touchable! There were some really cool puzzles... and there was the Pharoah's Tomb! I gotta tell ya - the kids did NOT want to go in that room! The 3 bigger ones started in and then turned around to wait for me... and discussed the possibility of NOT going... Luz was clinging to my hand and wanted me to CARRY her! I was laughing! I reminded them it was a CHILDREN's museum and it would be okay! Well, once we got in there and they saw the MUMMY and other cool stuff - they LOVED it! One thing in particular was the xray boxes. You could look into them and push a button and they let you see what it looked like INSIDE the mummy at that place. The boxes slid the entire length of the mummy so they could look at the whole thing! Very cool.

posted by Melli at 12:52 PM