The children’s museum problem can be traced directly to macaroni and cheese, which was once a yummy dinner but is now a syndrome. There are parents out there who eat a variety of exotic food but assume their kids will eat only pizza, chicken fingers and the aforementioned orange noodles. According to the mac-and-
cheese principle, if you offer children a salad or a salmon fillet, they slowly will starve to death, and it will be all your fault. Obviously, this is a bunch of hooey, because Thai kids eat Thai food.
It’s also thought a child cannot walk into a big room full of big adults and appreciate a big dinosaur. Better to build a Dinosauratorium! (or some other place ending with an exclamation point!) geared to 8-year-olds, except that such places are always clogged with newborn babies, who, I’m sorry, are way too young to know what they’re looking at. That never stops a parent intent on enrichment.
Excuses didn’t work
I usually come up with a good excuse to get out of going to a children’s museum. In Albuquerque, conveniently, something painful happened to my back, but my family made me go to Explora! anyway. And those same people had to drag me away hours later.
Explora! has three important pluses:
1. Even though it’s right next door to a natural history museum and concerns itself with principles like botany and brain chemistry, you don’t have to appreciate science to enjoy the exhibits, which were awe-inspiring enough to impress even me, and I still cannot grasp how a bunch of electrons can really be running through a lamp cord. The gravity machine, in which hundreds of wooden balls spiral through gates and chutes in a massive see-
through cube, reminded me more of Rube Goldberg than Sir Isaac Newton, but so what? Who doesn’t want to see a ball roll into a turtle’s mouth, be spat back out, whiz down a chute and fly through the air to land smack on top of a xylophone, producing a crisp pong!
2. The museum doesn’t talk down to kids, or up to adults. It assumes that all of us will think there’s something amazingly cool about a fountain in which actual blobs of water fly out of water cannons, like a room-sized lava lamp without walls. The current exhibit on memory, for instance, is only as complicated as you want it to be. Hundreds of Post-it Notes are stuck to a time-line of mankind’s history at the exhibit’s entrance – you’re supposed to add in your own historical landmarks. “I was born!” reads one from 1909. From 1964: “LSD discovered.” And from 2004: “My first day of first grade.” Farther along, you’re invited to taste jelly beans, blindfolded, and guess the flavors; to inhale mystery smells and identify them. Children appear to be better at taste than adults, but just about everyone has taken at least one bite of a Crayon, and thus can peg the smell.
3. You’re allowed to touch everything. That’s the point of the zinc channel filled with sand and flowing water – you move the sand around with your bare hands to simulate erosion and make Grand Canyons happen. But you could also just be messing around with wet sand, and none of the many volunteers would dream of stopping you.
Up the curving staircase, a theater showed a variety of movies, the most intriguing of which was “Dude, Where’s My Horse?” We couldn’t manage to get there, though, because we were sidelined by a tightrope. With a guy riding a bicycle across it. With a net suspended below it. Anyone could try it, and did. Certainly, this illustrated all kinds of scientific principles – you couldn’t fall off the tightrope if you tried, but to me it just meant I-can’t-believe-I’m-
riding-a-bike-across-a-tight-
rope.
Earliest memories
On a much less technical note, visitors were invited to sit at a desk and write their earliest memories in a beat-up diary. Grown-up entries were hauntingly sentimental. Kids’ were funnier, from “I saw a lot of multi-colored throw-up on the stairs” to “I came home from the hospital and the dogs licked and licked me, trying to figure out what I was.”
With that accomplished, it seemed like a good time to pop in to the Experiment Bar and try to build a wind generator, test spatial awareness or get plants to grow. If you wanted to get lost in your own little Thomas Edison world, you could. On the other hand, if you wanted to party in true Cat-in-the-Hat style, this would be the place, and though it would be mean to leave your kids at home, you could get away with it.
Apparently, the Explora! people are no fools. Once in a while, they hold an Adult Night.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
