New England children's museums

One of the good things about our membership to the Mississippi Children's Museum was the ACM reciprocal membership - we paid a little extra, and now we get in free or discounted to children's museums all over the country. Our Mississippi membership doesn't expire until December, so we're going through the list of reciprocal museums all over New England to take advantage of it.

We've been to three in Connecticut so far - the Lutz in Manchester, Kid City in Middletown, and Imagine Nation in Bristol. They were all fairly small, especially compared to the wide open spaces and big windows in Jackson. (Yep, I'm saying it. Mississippi set the standard for children's museums. Never thought that would be the case, but it is.) We're not rushing back to any of them to get a new membership but they were a nice way to spend an afternoon.

The Lutz is really small, maybe the size of the upstairs of our house. I didn't get any pictures there because we explored everything pretty thoroughly in less than an hour and the girls were done. There is a homeschool co-op held there that we're looking at joining this fall so we may be there more often in the future. We'll see.

Kid City seemed like it was a couple of buildings in an old/historic downtown area linked together with random halls. The rooms were quite small but there were a lot of them. Imagine Nation was a lot more open, and taller. The center of the building was open for 3 floors, but there wasn't anything up at the top. It's becoming apparent that "children's museums" are all really similar. The decor and setting are different in each, but I'm starting to look for stuff that's unique. The glass case of electric trains, the "shopping" center with toy food, some random musical instrument type-things, a reading section ... typical. Meh. Give me something different that I'm not going to find anywhere else.

Kid City did have a unique section - an Alaskan "fishing dock." There were tons of rubber fish with magnets on their noses, and there were various assembly line things to "process" and "sort" the fish. Birdie had a blast there and spent the last hour or so running the fish up a line to drop into a barrel (which she called a honeypot - someone's seen a lot of Winnie the Pooh cartoons).

We'll keep checking out children's museums around the area - in New England, there are about a dozen within 2-3 hours of our house. But I don't know that we'll get another children's museum reciprocal membership. We might go for the science museums next.

Kid City: Posy in the pop-up viewing area of the train.

Kid City: Magnolia in the ever-present "store" play area.

Kid City: Birdie climbed up on the counter to attach the fish to their magnet assembly line in the "fishery."

Kid City: Up go the fish along the slanted ceiling to the top of the window.

Kid City: And when they hit the gray thing at the end of their line, they drop into the barrel below. Birdie would retrieve them and take them back to the beginning to start over, and she did this again and again for quite awhile.

Imagine Nation: See? A store with play food. 

Imagine Nation: Posy with a bell shaker and drum in the musical area.

Imagine Nation: Sunny reading to Magnolia.