Reid and Angie's Place: Denver Museum of Nature and Science

After 3 days of pretty much sitting at home and stressing out about the fire, I hit a point where I knew I had to get out of the house or go crazy. But where? Over the last month, as we have dealt with fires and smoke, I have come to realize that our favorite places in the Springs are all outdoors. We don't do very much actually indoors. So, it only took about 10 minutes of talking myself into it to decide to go up to Denver to visit the Museum of Nature and Science. It has been on my list for a couple of months as I had heard that they had a great dinosaur exhibit. Because I didn't actually decide until 10am to go, we did get a late start, but we had a great day!

We got there at just the wrong time of day--all of the parking spaces were full and the museum had been open for only an hour, so no one was leaving. Since I don't know Denver well, I didn't know what to do. I ended up parking lot stalking someone and then rolling down my window to ask if they were leaving. It turns out the person was a young museum employee and upon seeing my two boys in the car she told me she wasn't leaving, but would give us her parking space. I have NO idea where she moved her car to, but I was SO grateful to her for her generosity!

The museum was more than I had expected and we had a great time. In fact, we need to go back as there was just to much to see in one day. We started in the Space exhibit, moved on to the gems, and then got lunch. After that it was the discovery center for kids, back down to the space exhibit for a show in the planetarium (awesome! And best part of the day--it was a show with Big Bird and was the perfect thing for the boys), back up to the nature exhibits, snakes and lizards, and then the dinosaurs. We didn't get time to see the Healthy Body exhibit and that looked fantastic, too. I really think it's worth a trip back with Reid. Kai just loved it!

While we were watching the Sesame Street planetarium show I looked over at Kai and worried that it might be too "young" for him. Then I racked my brain to see what age-range Sesame Street covered and I came up with the word "preschool". All of sudden it hit me that Kai still is "pre" school. At least for another 2 months at the time. It's amazing to me how mature and grown-up he has become at such a young age. He really did only just turn 5 and yet, in many respects, he seems so much older. Don't get me wrong, he still has some of the typical 5 year-old problems, but in other ways, he is so grown-up. I'm proud to be his mom (most of the time!) I apologize for all of the pictures, but there was just so much to see!

In the tunnel on the way to the outer space exhibit

A person pretending to be an astronaut that you could ask questions

My little scientists!

This was a topographical map/puzzle you were supposed to put together but
Finn liked stacking it up instead. He wanted to do the puzzle, but I didn't want to take the time.

A large gem found in Colorado. It was much bigger than this picture shows.

See the monkey. This is what he does ALL the time now. I can't get him to stop
climbing and hanging off of things. I thought gymnastics would help....but it's not!