The Whomptons go to the City Museum

In hopes of avoiding the endless crowds that constantly flock (and with good cause) to the City Museum, we took advantage of a day off that Krystal had to go to the City Museum this past friday. Raina last visited when she was a year and a half old. She seemed to have a lot of fun, but she really couldn't DO anything other then be encouraged to crawl places under heavy guard. With Raina's recent interest in climbing at the playground we had hopes for a much more active experience. Raina's initial reaction was being absolutely overwhelmed, although to be fair it's a pretty wierd place to try to wrap your head around, and while it was less crowded than normal, it was predominantly populated by extremely energetic teenagers on field trips who were bounding around the place flinging themselves down the many slides, pelting each other in the ball pits, and were generally impatient at the pace that we and Raina were interested in. Raina cautiously and apprehensively was ushered through the main floor of metal and wooden obstacles. She was not very interested in ambitious climbing, and was quite timid whenever you could "see through the floor". It would seem since our last visit Raina gained a healthy concern for her own well being and safety, which is quite frankly not very handy at the city museum where you can crawl through a metal mesh tunnel 6 stories up. So we scaled back our expectations and offered some simpler and seemingly more safe options of climbing up a turtle and through some somewhat familiar plastic tubing. Raina liked the fish tank and playing with the boats in the water. We had some success in the enchanted caves where we were able to convince her to do some adventurous crawling. We watched a magic show with a magician that believed a little too much in abusing the crowd, including a poor german girl that essentially broke down in tears. We took a break for lunch and then came back and tackled the outdoor part of the facility MonstroCity. We opted for an easy win and dropped Raina in the ball pit where she played happily for quite a while. The rest of our time mostly consisted of touring the many many many slides. Raina also roasted her first marshmellow.