The Purple Museum

It has been expecially fun to take Zane to places that I loved to visit as a kid. The purple museum (or the Children's Discovery Museum) was always one of my favorites. 

There are a whole lotta pictures in this post. Just letting you know. I narrowed it down to my favorites. Then I realized that I had more that twenty favorites. So there are a lot of them.

Purple!

Right when you walk in, there is a fire truck for the kids to play on. Zane would make a pretty cute firefighter.

He couldn't get enough of all the knobs and levers. 

He is such a good driver.

After the fire engine, we headed over to the dinosaur area. A few years ago, some fossils were found a little north of San Jose. Zane liked the dinosaur things, but his favorite thing was digging in the sand to find the fossils. We came back to this area later in the morning, so those pictures are later in the post. 

Zane and Grandma put on a shadow-puppet show for me and Clay and Chelsie. They should both puppeteer professionally. 

Lights are some of Zane's favorite things. He loved being able to control them spinning around and around with a wheel.

Who wouldn't want this cute boy driving an ambulance in an emergency? He climbed into the ambulance and up into the driver's seat all on his own. 

Since Chelsie wants to be a nurse, Mom told her to go inside the ambulance for a picture. I don't think that Chelsie pretending to be dead on the stretcher was quite what she had in mind.  

This giant pinboard thing was always one of my favorite things at the purple museum. Zane didn't let me down as he spent time pushing the pins in over and over while people on the other side pushed them back. It's always the simple things, isn't it?

Then Zane put on an apron and headed into the water area. Water and balls. Could Zane be more in heaven?

Chelsie got in on the action by throwing a ball up into the whirlpool.

Clay helped Zane thow a ball into it too. Then we realized that there was a vacuum on the wall that would suck up the ball and shoot it across the room into the tank. Oops. Zane had fun with that once we figured it out.

Zane was even happier when we realized that there was a toddler water area. He got everyone around him completely soaked. 

When we were done playing in the water, we moved up into the toddler room. There were different areas that were exciting for each of the senses. This room was dark except for the lighted merry-go-round in the middle. The horses cast cool colored shadows up on the walls. I played around with my camera settings until I could get a fun no-flash picture to really try to capture how cool the room looked. 

Then we headed back to the dinosaur room and got back in the sand. Zane would have been content to stay here all day. 

As we were finishing up, we found a whole other wing of the museum that we hadn't visited yet. I'm glad we didn't miss it. There were a bunch of animal habitats that kids could play around in. Zane had fun playing in the eagle's nest. He also enjoyed going into the bear's cave. 

Our last stop of the day was the bubble room. The bubble solution they have is amazing. I found the recipe at the Discovery Museum website:

Bubble Recipe

(found Here)

You need: 

1 clean bucket

¼ cup Joy dishwashing 

detergent

1 TBSP glycerin (optional)

2 ½ cups water

1. Measure water into the bucket

2. Add dishwashing detergent to 

the water

3. Add the glycerin

4. Stir, but not too much.  You 

don’t want froth

Zane was happy just playing in the soapy water while I made big bubbles. 

And here is Zane playing in some more bubble solution while two little boys try to blow the gigantic bubble. Seeing as they were blowing from two different sides, they were not successful. 

I'm so happy that we were able to go to the purple museum! It was even better than I remembered. If we lived close, we would definately need a pass. Bubbles, water, sand, trucks, lights, balls... what more could a Zane want?