Apr
6

Strong Museum of Play

The Strong Museum of Play is located right in the middle of downtown Rochester NY. Its a wonderful childrens museum with some really cool exhibits. I wish it were a smidge closer to home but really, an hour or so drive isn’t too bad. Here’s their website if you want more information: http://www.strongmuseum.org/.

We took Ian last May and he had a really fun time….we’ve been meaning to get back for a while now but it just was a challenge to fit in the schedule. This weekend we happened to have some free time and I thought it would be fun to go. You know its going to be an exciting day when the big statute outside gets a “wow!!!!” as you drive past on your way into the parking lot. 🙂

We actually ended up getting a FAMILY membership now that Mr. Ian is of admission-paying age. 🙂 I figure, we need to go 2 more times this year to make the membership worthwhile. Shouldn’t be a problem because we had an AWESOME time yesterday. We ended up staying very close to 3 hours. I wish the museum opened a little earlier because its hard to get all our playing done before Ian needs a nap (and is no longer willing to behave). 🙂

We got to the museum at around 10:30am (opens at 10am) and we immediately took off for the Wegmans/grocery store exhibit. Last time we came, it was full and they weren’t letting anymore children in. We wanted to be sure to play in that section before the museum got too busy. We had a good time there and then were off to explore the rest of the museum. We checked out a bunch of exhibits but there were a lot of placed we didn’t even get to! Good thing we have a family membership, we can go back over and over.

Here are a bunch of pictures from our visit! More are on our Shutterfly website, if you’re interested.

Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden at the Strong Museum of Play
In addition to the playing going on, the museum actually has a Butterfly Garden. Its kind of a greenhouse with a shocking number of butterflies flying around. Its absolutely incredible! Entrance into the Butterfly Garden is $3 per person and TOTALLY worth the admission price. We got some good pictures (and some not so good video) but we couldn’t stay long as it was very hot and very much PAST lunch time for certain 2 year olds. 🙂

Lots of credit to Mike for the great butterfly pictures….they really came out great!

VIDEOS!!!
Don’t worry….next time Mike has been instructed to hold the camera STILL while the butterflies fly around (vs trying to follow them with the camera and giving all the viewers motion sickness). 🙂
Ian found the one place in the museum that he could dig and he played in here for a good 15-20 minutes:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2567711776994368641&hl=en

Simulation racecars that you can “race” while watching the action on a big screen tv:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7911268425331563143&hl=en

Posted by Amanda demon child, family fun Subscribe to RSS feed