Day at the Museum(s)

We decided to do something different this year with our New Year's plans. We stayed at our friend's house (Beverly,Jessica, and Preston) in Sandy, Utah. We were delighted to learn that the Natural History Museum of Utah was open on New Years Day. It was a brand new building and we've had this on our list of places to go now for a year or more. It was great to be walking up the steps of this new large building:

In the main lobby there was this dinosaur that would talk (in a gruff voice) every time you would feed it a coin. Ava thought it was cool. Isaac didn't warm up to it until we exited the building a few hours later... Haha

There was a huge map of the Great Basin. It was too large to photograph it from the first floor. So I just took a picture of the area I know best.
 Can you see where we live?!

Lots of wonderful, interactive exhibits for people of all ages.

Ava and Bryan interacted with computers while Isaac assembled some atoms :)

We spent some time in the kid's fun center........

Then, we thought we better peel ourselves away from that room because there was so much more to explore ahead of us! 

They had a working paleontology lab...... just before you walked into the world of the dinosaurs:

Isaac and Ava, right in the middle of a dino track!

This next photo is actually a photo of dinosaur skin! Looks like this reptile needed a deep tissue massage....
;)

New discoveries on every floor..........

This exhibit helped explain to Ava ~ the basin and range topography.....

"Geology Rocks!"

Isaac's favorite part of the museum was this sand and water play table:

While the water washed sand in between their fingers, I walked a very short distance to the living fossils:

Skulls of those from the past:

This Alpine exhibit featured the one and only Wheeler Peak/Jeff Davis/Glacier cirque in Great Basin National Park :)
Of course, the centerpiece of it all: the bristlecone pine. 

Can you tell that our walk through the museum wore the kids out? Plus, we were all hungry....

After a late lunch, Ava started feeling feverish and really tired. Luckily it only lasted for a few hours. It was weird. Jessica had tickets for a temporary Tinker Toys kid's museum at the Gateway in SLC so she and Beverly took Isaac to see it. Bryan and I drove to the store to get Ava some Tylenol. She felt much better.

Here are are the photos that I stole from Jessica :)

Too cute!
"Thank you Bev & Jessica for sharing a great day!"

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."

~ Author: Anonymous