The National Children's Museum

On Ryan's birthday, we hit traffic traveling to the museum, so we didn't get there as early as we would have liked. The last half hour of the day is free, so we didn't have to pay anything to get in. One of the reasons we chose this museum is because they were supposed to be affiliated with Sesame Street and have some of the characters. It was raining that day (as you can tell from the rain coats on the boys) but an indoor museum worked well.

 The Sesame Street characters were really only in the children 1-3 zone, and the older boys weren't allowed to play in there. I took Ryan for a little while, but he would rather play with his big brothers. He did check out some of the smaller things, and you can see him playing with a dinosaur in the pictures below.

 
 There was also a little station where you could create your own pizza (with fake food).

 Ryan and Joshua checked out this station for a little while.

 The biggest hit of the night was the fire engine station. You hit a big button on the wall that said "EMERGENCY" and then the lights and sirens would go on the truck after the woman on the phone would say "What's your emergency? We'll send someone right away!"

There were even boots, pants, coats and hats lined up along the wall for the kids to put on and play fireman. They LOVED it!

And with it being the end of the day, very few other kids were there anymore. It wasn't crowded at all, so the kids enjoyed each area thoroughly.

 There was a section with packed luggage that you could go through and see where the people had traveled (my boys skipped right by it).

They did stop and build race cars to race down tracks. Since I was helping Ryan, I didn't have free hands to take a picture of it. But, my little man highly enjoyed this area.

While Ryan continued to race cars, the other boys went to a kitchen area to make food. They highly enjoyed it, Shawn said.

We probably could have used another half an hour or an hour there, but I'm glad we didn't pay the fee to get in because I don't think we could have made a whole day of it. The kids had fun for the time we were there! :)