"Snow Day" Fun: Museum and Lunch

Last week the hubby and kiddos had Spring Break. We spent most of the week working on house hunting and projects, but squeezed some fun in as well. We also had a bonus vacation day: because the school only used 2 of their allotted snow days, everyone was given the Monday after Easter off as well! Woo hoo! After all of our hard work the previous week, we decided that we needed to have a family fun day.

We surprised the kids by taking them to the Buffalo Museum of Science. We have a membership, but hadn't used it here; Pete and I used it in New York City for our 10th anniversary in October at the Intrepid Air, Sea & Space museum, though! We had sooo much fun, and I took a bazillion pictures and movies. I'm trying to limit how many I share, so please bear with me if it seems overwhelming!

Me, being the nerd that I am, had to wear my super awesome space leggings:

We were greeted by this friendly guy!

The kids took turns trying to get the rocket to go all the way to the ceiling. They had to pull a lever back and forth to build up the pressure, and then there was a button to push to release the pressure and send the rocket up in the air. They never got it to ring, but they did get pretty close!

This guy cracked me up!

Mastodon!

My little paleontologists!

I'm such a goon. Like seriously, I was giggling forEVER because this sounded like one of the ridiculous names people call Benedict Cumberbatch!!!!

"Cumberland Monkeyface"

Me and my favorite kind of dino!

This thing is a fish skull! It is HUGE. Totally could have swallowed me up easily. It made us think about Jonah being swallowed up by a big fish!

Ry playing the world's largest playable guitar in the guitar exhibit:

Paigey practicing her surgeon skills! She had to control thread the rope through eyelets, and let me just tell you, it is NOT as easy as it looks!

This was really cool. You put your hands on the bar, and it would tell you your heart rate and then the glowing heart would light up, pulsing along with your heart!

I loved this little visual. Growing up I thought that there were little men operating an elevator, taking the food from your mouth to your stomach, so this just made me feel not as silly ;)

Building cars and racing them!

Paigey building towers, trying to see if they would withstand earthquake forces:

Daddy treated us to one of the 3D National Geographic movies! We saw "Asteriod", and it was pretty amazing what astronauts are working on now and in the future. Then we find out that a big asteroid was coming "close" to earth afterwards? It was so cool talking about what we had learned and why the astronauts weren't worried about it.

It was really nice that we went on a day where most kids were in school. The place was pretty deserted, so it felt like we had the place to ourselves most of the morning. We didn't mind that the kids would run off to explore as long as they were in the same room because it was so empty; that's one nice thing about them getting older, not having to watch them every single second!

There was sooo much else that we did, but I can't get the videos to play in here :( I may upload them all to YouTube and then do another blog post on it. We also weren't able to get to the fourth floor; they're working on putting in a new exhibit (all astronomy!), so we're definitely going to have to go back for that. 

After the museum, we went to Applebee's for lunch. Pete was given a gift card there from his swim team as a thank you for coaching them, so this was a really nice way to finish off our family fun time!

Ry and I played tic-tac-toe....

Nate loooved his chicken mac and cheese and steamed broccoli...

...and this was the "pretty" face I got from Paigey! She just wanted to get back to eating, silly girl!

It was a great way to end our vacation and celebrate all of our hard work. We are definitely looking forward to going back soon!

What is your favorite museum?