Kinston Nature Center and Planetarium

We took our Girl Scout friends to this surprisingly cool place about an hour from our house today. I'd heard some good things about it, but it was still much better than I expected. And it's free! Amazing! A few years ago, area girl scouts re-tiled this wall for the museum and we took our Crazy Daisy pictures in front of it. Bree was our little tagalong for this adventure because Daddy's not here and it made me sad to think of leaving her with a sitter when she knew Carly and I were off having an adventure. (Also! I figured out the trick to getting her in jeans...tights underneath. I got zero complaints about how much the pants hurt. Yay!)

So, if you're local and trying to find a great all-day activity for your kiddos, this place is great. There are two main buildings: one is the nature center with cases of live and stuffed native animals. They even had a live hedgehog and a pool of hermit crabs and a lobster. There is a lobster in the touch-tank, you read that right. There IS a hand-lettered sign reminding visitors to keep their hands away from that guy. So crazy! Anyway, the other building has all KINDS of science exploratory stuff downstairs, including a mouth/stomach the kids can climb through, some air pressure exhibits, a bee hive, etc. The upstairs is dedicated to outer space stuff. Given the pretty modest looks of the place, they have a whole lot of informative and interactive stations for the kids plus an actual planetarium where we saw a show about the star constellations you can see in North Carolina. The girls got a BIG kick out of that. 

Carly's FACE when the lady opened up the beehive. =)

So now we're home and exahusted from our fun day! Outside there is also an AWESOME playground with some really cool fossil digging pits and, for warmer weather, a train and rock climbing wall. It's an amazing park! We will definitely be back, because you know how much I love adventures that last an entire day!!!

We had TWO extra parents with us today!!! It was GREAT! I'm hoping that more parents will start being able to join us, as I have noticed that girls whose parents are never able to participate in events or meetings tend to have the hardest time staying focused and remembering to follow our standard operating procedures. It can't be easy for them to see everyone else's parents come to stuff and theirs never can - that definitely helps my patience level when I'm chasing girls across the parking lot because they just decided that it's NOT time to get in the car, after all. =)