oh, olympia!

Our friends Greg & Shelby are here visiting from Chicago for a couple of days, so we took them to Olympia for the day. G had a snooze in the car (aided by my big hat).

Jenn, Vance & Lucy met us there this morning at the children's museum, which is really more of a place to play. They have lots of fun things to do, and I saw a a lot of the adults (me too!) messing around with some of the activities.
I really liked this magnetic table with gears. You can set up the gears to make bells ring, then there's a ball wall, where you can create your own chute for a ball to travel down the wall. Tres cool.


And they had a giant version of those little things with the pins in them that you can press stuff into so that it makes a 3-d image of something. They used to be a big seller for Spencers, as I recall (do they still have spencers? as a preteen I loved that store!) G and I tried it out. here's G's profile.


Another big hit was the water table. G and Lucy (and we adults) spent a pretty good amount of time arranging walls to change the flow of the water on the water table. It was so fun. Here's my favorite picture from the day. And another picture that has a better view of the table (note adults playing too!)




There was a room for babies too, with a padded floor for little ones to crawl around on and lots of stuff for younger kids. On the other side of the building there was a whole wing of rooms for pretend play--a doctor's office (complete with xrays, a lighted thing for looking at the xrays (what are those called, Yvonne?), a dentists office, a store (with cash registers, and lots of play food), a delivery truck, a house...If I lived in Oly I'd get a membership and take G there once a week just to play. We thought it was really cool.

After the CM we went down to the water front for lunch and then went for a long walk. We walked on this paved trail through the woods. The trail led right right by a little babbling brook. The walk was shady and relaxing. Just what we needed after a nice lunch. Before we knew it, it was already 4 and time to go home. It was great to see, the Portland crew, but the visits always end too soon.