staycation III

Down in the valley, down in downtown San Jose (my favorite 'hood!) is the Children's Discovery Museum.  It's a huge purple building, pretty hard to miss.  Inside is a huge variety of fun stuff for kids, all hands - on and educational.  Little P. was in her element, but we only had a handful of quarters so we did as much as parking meter would allow.

Highlighting our favorite spots:  the water station (above) has tributaries that you can follow with plastic balls; there are tanks and waterfalls and currents and funnels; pressure - run stuff that is really fun to watch and yes you do get pretty wet (all part of the experience, right?)

The bubble center was also great, too bad all the pictures turned out blurry (hard to stand still around the bubbles ya know)

You can simulate surfing on a board in front of this huge screen.  It's like really being there!  There's a snowboard part too.  Really cool, especially the wipe - outs!

Next to the surfing there's a climbing wall, again impossible to photograph due to constant movement (let's just say - she's good!)

The textured imprint wall is extremely popular.  Kids love to push from both sides, and you can use anything but your face to create a design.  Feels really cool too.

Of course anything crafty is right up our alley.  One room had build - your - own gnome homes with slices of logs, driftwood, silk leaves and plastic frogs and turtles.  We had a great time building a gnome condo with several stories and trap doors too.

Then it was on to the corn husk doll center to make a keepsake of our day.  She sat for some time concentrating on this activity and I am proud to say I did not help her at all.  Here we are making the hair into braids.  So cute.

Wow, craft content peeps!!!  Just like olden times.

A very cool day.  Especially since there was air conditioning.

After this we hit the Asian Market in Japantown for salmon and tuna onigiris, cold milk tea, yan yan cookie dip, four kinds of Pocky, cheap nori and buckwheat noodles, a bag of pea shoots and oh yeah I scored a couple of new bento boxes for good measure!

They will come in handy when school starts.  But let's not talk about that yet shall we.  Thank you.