Portland Children's Museum

We skipped part of the Oregon Zoo so we would have time to hit the Portland Children's Museum located across the parking lot from the zoo. Besides the kids were getting tired of walking.

Just inside the door of the children's museum is their water works exhibit. This area has several water play tables with a variety of ways play with the water. There is a major flaw in the design of this area: most of it is out of reach of children under about three or four years old. Josh could just barely reach this one water table which happened to have a step on one side. He loves playing in water and it was a shame he couldn't reach most of it. Sammy, on the other hand, could reach it all and enjoyed doing such things as turning a crank that rotated a water wheel that had a variety of strange objects to scoop the water with...like a baby's shoe and a rubber fish.

This area of the children's museum was a hit with the younger crowd. It was a large area filled with cleaned rubber pieces that we parents guessed was chunks of tires and running track. They had a variety of scoops, buckets, and dump trucks available. Josh liked this area a lot. While I was watching Josh, the older kids were busy in the store set up nearby. Their favorite part of the store was the miniture grocery carts (that some stores have for the kids) and the cash registers that beep as if it is scanning the products. The Hands on Children's Museum in Olympia has a similar store area but it is smaller and doesn't have carts (only baskets) or beeping cash machines. For this reason alone, I think, Sammy likes Portland better.

There was also a neat stage there. It comes complete with a curtain you can open and close, stage makeup (face paint) you can apply yourself, costumes, and working lighting. After watching Josh dig for what felt like forever, I left him under the supervision of a friend to check on the older kids. I found Sammy entertaining a handful of parents with chicken jokes.

Later, Josh and I joined the older kids at the stage. He wanted these shoes put on him.

Meanwhile, Mika went back and forth between working the lights and being on stage.

While there were other parts of the museum, they were small areas that didn't interest the kids. We spent more than an hour at the stage while various kids entertained us with their on-stage antics.