Day Tripper

Yesterday Clarke and I took the kids down to Waco for a day trip.  I have an unofficial summer bucket list (well, it's actually sort of official since I wrote it all out with my colored gel pens) and going to a splash pad and the Waco children's museum were both on my list.  

Our first stop was the splash pad in Cameron Park.  Conveniently, the disc golf course is also in Cameron Park, so Clarke played disc golf while the kids and I hung out at the splash pad.

Arden wouldn't get her face wet, but she had fun prancing around and singing little songs to herself.  She loves to talk about Baby Junior (her imaginary friend on her foot), and seemed to be talking to him a lot while she played in the water.

Huston was a lot braver about getting water in his face, and had such a great time that he didn't want to leave.

After the splash pad, we headed to Kitok for lunch.  It was soooo yummy!

The Waco Children's Museum was up next.  I was really impressed with it!  It was really uncrowded, until a birthday party showed up near the end of our visit, and there were lots of cool things to explore.  And it was waaay cheaper than the Fort Worth museum - $6 for adults and $4 for kids.

Huston had a great time pretending to drive this car in the transportation room.  He took me all the way to New Mexico (his favorite place to pretend we're going on vacation).

Arden looked adorable as a little fire fighter.

There was a room where the kids could practice lots of different styles of writing, like calligraphy and hieroglyphics, and there was one table with "hobo language" on it.  I made note of the symbol on the far left in the middle, "these people beat up hobos" just in case I ever become a hobo and need to look out for that.

There was a whole room with all these little cars that the kids loved driving around and filling up with gasoline.  This was where the uncrowded-ness of the museum was really great, because they had it almost all to themselves.

A pretend garden, which I thought was so cute and clever.  It was located right by the cars, so you could drive to your "house" which had the garden out back, and then go inside the house to the kitchen to cook your food.  It was really cute.

The music room had this big keyboard you could walk on, and a sound booth where you could play on a keyboard.

The kids loved the water room and had fun making channels with Clarke for the ducks and boats to go down.

Huston loved pulling this cord to make a giant bubble wall.  You could also stand on a platform and pull a hula hoop up to form a big bubble tube around yourself.  It was pretty neat.

The little tea party room.  Arden made tea for her special guest, Daddy.

There were lots and lots of other rooms I didn't take pictures of.  We played with magnets, levers and pulleys, explored the heart, saw a train going around a replica of Waco, looked at rooms full of animals, fish, and insects, and did lots of other things, and didn't even make it to a whole section that had dinosaur bones, or the special exhibit on the Mayans.  It really was a great museum - rivaling Fort Worth's for sure and I might say it was even better.

The kids were worn out by a little after 3, so we left the museum and picked up some frozen treats at Katie's Custard and ate them on the way home.  Then the kids passed out from exhaustion and we had a nice peaceful drive home.

We love you, Waco!