Temecula Children's Museum

On Wednesdays, the cleaning ladies come to Marina's house, so since we have to get out, I've decided that Wednesdays will be our Big Adventure Day.

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For our first official Big Adventure, we drove half an hour out to Temecula to visit their supercool kids' museum. I think they call it the Imagination Station. It's so interesting and fun, and if we're here, it will be a great place for Carly to grow into.

Hanging out on the porch waiting for the museum to open.
Running away!

I was on the phone with Paul (yay!) while we were waiting, and the girls were so good, running back and forth along the porch.
Come back!
I don't know why, but I like this photo.
Silly face! Even though Marina kind of looks like she's doing a Mad Monster face. Carly's checking for accuracy and demonstrating good silly form.
You have to go to this place to get it. It is set up like a house - sort of - with tons of stuff everywhere all rigged up like crazy experiments. It's amazing. Marina loved this huge purple chair.
Across the hall from the purple chair room (which has a secret passageway through a faux fireplace into a black-lit maze room - way cool.), is the magnets and electricty room. I forget the title of the room, but did you know that a snowy TV will react this way to magnets? It was groovy.
Same room, two huge tables with lots of sensory experiments. Carly kept looking through this magnifying glass, then picking up the shell and examining it, then looking through the glass again, trying to figure it out.
See? This is the big view of the room. There is a fake skeleton, kind of random, lying on the counter to the left of my purple girl.

Then! This was fun for the chicks because there were switches to flip, but for older kids, there is some interesting information about how much electricity different kinds of bulbs use.
In a super-secret room that has no door, only two crawl-through passageways. The stuff in there shows how plastics and cans are recycled. Again, a little above our heads today, but still so cool to look at.
Oh, my darling destructive daughter. This is in the hallway, and it's showing how airplanes fly. The wall is covered with illustrations and explanations, but Carly was fascinated with stomping on the pedal and making the air flow slow down and stop so the ball would fall off. This is after she discovered the handle off to the side that can make the jet swing back and forth...and if you do it hard enough...that's right, the ball flies off.

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As a side note, do you see the flooring? All throughout, it is this beautiful hardwood inlaid with different designs.

What do you do when your little girl says: "Oh, Mom! The camma. Show alla da teef, Mom!"
when you step into the kaleidescope display in the "Illusion" room?
This room is connected to the crazy blacklight maze (pics later) and has some dressup stuff that the girls weren't totally into, as well as some other visual effects that they're not old enough to understand. Carly was pretty excited about the fireman gear for about thirty seconds.

And the KITCHEN was the coolest. You can see the chained-up fridge in the background and they had rigged up the sink with two powerful magnets and some magnetic sand. Carly's arms weren't long enough to play, but Marina was really into it.
Across the hall from the kitchen was the bathroom. There was a cool water display - all enclosed, thankfully - where the toilet would have been and this bubbly thing was the big hit of the day.
Then on to the music room! I can't even begin to tell you all of the cool experiments with sound, like voice delays and graphs of sound waves that were in this room. The girls were most excited about this piano that has been altered so if you press certain keys, different sounds happen, like a clapped rhythm, a pan flute, some chords, it's cool. And see the top of the piano? It's like that all over the place, just tons of stuff.
While Marina was still hanging out with the piano, Carly engaged in her favorite hobby: Daddy Stealing. This poor man was just trying to get some father-son time with his little guy and Carly walked up and took over. Fortunately, the little boy was sort of in love with Carly, so he didn't mind. No, really. He followed us around the whole time we were there and kept trying to hold Carly's hand. Shhh...don't tell Andy.
Then back to the black room! The girls spent half an hour running in and out of the fireplace and grinning at eachother. It was so cute! This is Marina - I think.

This is a tribute to (both of ) our dearly departed goldfish. Big thanks to Maria for taking care of the scoop and flush for me, since I couldn't do it without barfing.
We needed to fill a few minutes before taking off for our lunch, so the girls borrowed some crayons and made beautiful pictures. Carly was pretty excited about it.
After lunch at the beautiful Promenade mall, we got these adorable cookies. They're ghosts! You should have heard the girls doing the whoooooo sound for the cookie lady. They even wiggled around like little ghosts.

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See how Carly is in the background just waiting for her chance to pounce?

While Marina cheesed it up for the camera! I love this little giggle with her bajillions of dimples.
Yeah, and GONE in about two seconds.

And...in about two weeks...
What, it was good. Now let me get this one last part rrrright here.
Passed OUT. She tucked herself in.
Sooo sleepy. With her third shirt of the day.