Children's Museum

When I was little, my parents brought us on some cool family vacations. I’ve been to all of the provinces east of Ontario, and all up and down the U.S. east coast. I’ve been on several ferries, and have seen the Anne of Green Gables Homestead (long before it caught on fire). I have been to Cape Cod, and visited the Plymouth Plantation and Plymouth Rock, I’ve been inside the White House, the Smithsonian, thrown tea overboard into Boston Harbour, and visited the Boston Children’s Museum, Science North in Sudbury, and the London Regional Children’s Museum in London, Ontario.

Last year, while researching for local areas of interest where I could bring Miles, I learned that we have our own children’s museum right here in Waterloo Region.

I added a vacation day onto this past Easter long weekend, and was determined to get Miles out to do something different together. On Saturday afternoon, we made our first visit to the Waterloo Regional Children’s Museum. We started off in TotSpot, a gallery for children up to 4 years of age. It was a nice, darkened room with lots of different things to feel and hear and see and do. Miles squealed in delight when some other children came in to join him at play. From there we went upstairs to the Mechanical City and experimented with sound at the Gear Wall, and Miles had fun pushing in the “pins” on the Pin Wall. We didn’t have time to check out the Creation Station, and it was too hard to manoeuvre a stroller in Construction Alley, so we continued on. We went upstairs once more to the Energy Playground. We first tried out the Flash Wall, where you push a button, then strike a pose, wait for the flash then see the shadow you’ve created on the wall. This was pretty cool because even Miles could stick out his hands and see their shadows on the wall. Then we found the PlasmaCar Raceway. I knew this would be something that Miles would enjoy. It was pretty cool too. You just sit on this little plastic cars, pull your feet up off of the floor and rest them on the car, then wiggle the steering wheel and off you go! Miles couldn’t really coordinate the lifting of the feet and the wiggling of the steering wheel, but he loved motoring around all the same. Then we quickly explored six different forms of energy (a wee bit beyond a 1-year old), before heading to the next exhibit. Before leaving, we visited the Water Garden in the basement. Here we played a little in an exhibit named Thoughts Flow. We redirected the water flow and dropped our boats in to see where they would go. Miles was having such a good time that he tried to climb in! Apparently there was a lot more to the Water Garden and Thoughts Flow than what we experienced, but we’ll make sure to leave plenty of time for that during our next visit. We totally missed Floor 4 too, where there are Special Exhibits (Eyes on Earth until May 7, 2006) and the Glow-in-the-Dark Room.

The museum was a great place to spend some time with Miles. I look forward to taking him there again some day, to watch him explore and giggle and learn and look around in awe.

If you haven’t been there yet, you should go! And don’t forget to bring a kid with you!