Last Monday, the kids' daycare was closed, so we had a day out in Philadelphia. We took the train into the city and once we got on street level, Sean pointed at one of the skyscrapers (which happened to be the one I work in) and asked if we could go up there. I was happy to oblige! My office is on top of a mall which had a display of Philadelphia's most notable buildings portrayed in gingerbread:
After a quick stop at Mommy's office to look out the windows to see the "little taxis" down on the street, we headed over to Drexel's Academy of Natural Sciences museum. Sean was so excited about all the dinosaur bones!
The Academy is celebrating its 200th birthday and one of the dinosaurs was decked out to celebrate:
Sean was so excited - "It's the dinosaur's birthday! He's 2 years old - he's having a party with those birds and the birds made him a cake!"
There was a neat exhibit with a camera and a green screen that allowed Sean to put himself in a "dinosaur jungle land!!!!"
"Hi, Longneck! Hi!"
The upper levels of the museum had a ton of dioramas with stuffed animals, which both kids loved. They especially liked the lion, polar bear, deer, and panda dioramas.
The museum wasn’t very crowded, but there were several small groups of kids on field trips. We kept pace with a group of kids that were probably in the second grade and Sean would just go off with the kids and forget I was there! He would just start talking to whoever was next to him about whatever animal we were looking at and the little girls thought he was cute and the boys would just treat him like a pal. Clare wanted to look at whatever Sean was NOT looking at, so that was a little hairy at times but once we finally broke away from the school groups, the museum was pretty much empty and I could let them walk around freely while watching both of them.
The kids managed to sit still for a turtle-riffic photo op:
There were plenty of hands-on exhibits for the kids to put their mitts on, as well:
The special exhibit was an indoor butterfly house with butterflies zooming around willy-nilly. Both kids loved that and we spent a good amount of time there despite the fact that the butterfly house is kept at like, 85 degrees with 100% humidity.
Sean kept following this Owl Butterfly around - he was trying to count how many eyes are on the butterfly:
After that we’d seen pretty much everything so we had lunch and then headed back towards the train to go home.
