Science Time

On Wednesday we tried to get out a little earlier in the day so we skipped the homework/napping part of the day.  Even so it was still 11:00 am by the time we left – good grief we are slow!  Today we headed to the Arizona Science Center.  We found it easy enough, we just could find where you park.  So we went around the block again.  Then when we did find where to park we couldn’t because we had the car top carrier on and wouldn’t fit.  So we went around the block again and finally ended up in the right place.  The men in the parking garage were very helpful and that was really nice.  Nothing like not knowing where you are to help you remember to be extra nice to the next person you meet who it lost and needs patient, slow, easy to understand directions.

So we made it all the way across the street to the science center and forgot the camera.  So we returned to the car…well, we did eventually make it into the science center.  Here are a few of the things we did.

The first section was on your brain and how it works and processes information.  This is how this contraption was supposed to work:So you were to be as relaxed as you could to move the ball to the opponents side of the table, but it seemed that no matter what we did, unless the opponent side was empty, the ball always rolled one direction.  Oh, well.  Here are Mark and Abbie trying to be bored.  Neil tried it, but for just a minute and then he sat on my lap while I had a go.We also saw some brains.  The human brain was at the end in a case with a mirror underneath it so you could even see the underside.  Pretty cool.Here you pretended to be a doctor working through a magnifying glass to pick marbles up without touching the sides of the little holes.  Kind of like the game of Concentration.  Abbie did a pretty stinking good job.The kids pedaled and pedaled to see how many calories they could burn.You could also look through this MRI type machine and look at each of the systems in your body and see where all the parts were, what they did and how they fit into your body.They had wheel chair races set up (we ran into a fairly large, rambunctious school group here that needed a few more helping hands) with two wheel chairs that would race against each other.  The screen showed you how fast you were going and where you and the other person were in the race.  Mark only did it once, but Abbie raced three times.  I raced her one of the times and my arms were DEAD tired when we finished and I only pulled ahead at the very very end.

On the second floor there was a whole room on levers and pulleys and other such simple machines that make our life easier.  The kids loved using the pulleys to pull themselves up in the chairs.  They pulled Neil up too and he loved it.

They also had a real bed of nails and I lost track how many times the kids went on that.  After you laid down you pushed the button and the nails would slowly rise out of the bed and then when you let go of the button they went back down.  It was amazing that you could hardly feel them at all since your weight was so evenly distributed across them.  Yep, Abbie convinced me to try it too.Next we went to a room on weather.  The kids got a few good vortex rings of smoke out of this thing.And they had a 3-D weather experience center with big screens around it to watch really intense weather on, along with heat lamps, fans, loud speakers, a moveable floor and water sprayers.  It went though tornados, hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes. etc.  It was pretty cool!  At first Spencer was terrified to go on it, so he and I stood close to the back where the camera wouldn’t get wet.  But later he jumped up into the center when Mark and Abbie went again.Neil’s favorite thing he saw was a bird right down on his level.  He couldn’t stop signing bird to me after that.  One other really funny thing was when we asked Neil if he wanted to push a button on a display he’d lift up his shirt and push his “button,”  well belly button.The very top floor didn’t get many visitors I’m guessing, because the girl working there looked surprised to see us.  But there were looks of cool things here about different kinds of energy and what the pros and cons for each were plus a few displays on energy sources that you wouldn’t expect like cow pies and pond scum.  This one showed how much energy each type of light took to turn on.We were all totally starving and I had run out of granola bars so we just shared a salad down at the café because nothing else they had really looked very good.  It had strawberries, walnuts and goat cheese on it and I had never had goat cheese before.  It reminds me of fete cheese.  The really sad part is that we had finished off the water bottles we brought and the water they had there was also dirt flavored.  The kids had a great time, but we were all ready for a nap, especially Neil.

That evening we got to visit our totally awesome friends from when Ken and I were newly weds living in Phoenix.  We had a pumpkin cake dessert and attempted to play a game while we visited and laughed.  Neil was quite a hit at their house with the little kids, they just could keep from picking him up.  It was pretty cute.  Neil introduced them to his favorite you-tube video, Firebolt.  The older kids played some more games and we wish we could’ve stayed longer.