Road Trip: Day 4

It was another fun and busy day for the Mobergs in Omaha. After some tasty eggs, bacon, and toast for brekkie, we went to the Omaha Children's Museum, where we spent several hours exploring all the exhibits and activities with the girls.

Funny story: Sandy subscribes to the Tioga Tribune, our "hometown" newspaper, and has several issues lying around her house. I browsed them and saw a feature within them: subscribers are encouraged to take photos of themselves in far-flung places holding up a copy of the Tribune and then to send in the pics to the newspaper. We grabbed a copy and posed with it in front of a sign that would make clear where in the world we were, and Sandy intends to send it to the paper. Does it matter that she subscribes to it but we don't?

Just had to have Sandy pose beneath this sign outside the museum. The "splish-splash garden" is a series of water jets in the sidewalk that can be activated and then played in on a hot summer day.

The featured exhibit today was DinO!saurs, involving animatronic replicas of several of the beasts along with informative displays and activities. Here the girls compare their feet with the footprint of a prehistoric creature.

Hillary, Abigail, and Suzanna are mimicking the triceratops behind them (notice how Suzanna is providing the third horn for Abigail; sisters are always there for one another).

They were told, "Assume your fiercest dinosaur pose."

A large section of the museum is given over to the Super Gravitron, a several-rooms-large system of tubes, machines, and plastic balls that teaches kids about pneumatic, hydraulic, and mechanical forces. For this part of the Super Gravitron, a child sits on the chair and places one of the plastic balls (the blue thing to Hillary's right) over an air tube to seal the air flow and cause the chair to rise (notice her feet up off the floor; when she removed the ball, the air flow resumed, and the chair floated back down to the floor).

At this station of the Super Gravitron, a child inserts plastic balls in the PVC pipe opening (to Abigail's right) and then uses the yellow wheel to control the auger inside the clear tube to move the balls up and into the next section of the machine. (All the balls eventually make their way to a clear bin in the ceiling of the central room, and all the children gather there to wait for the bin to fill up and then dump its contents all over them and the floor! Then they scoop up as many balls as they can hold and head off for another section of the Super Gravitron.)

The tube in front of Suzanna is a portal for a stream of air in which she balanced the green and yellow balls. So long as she placed them carefully, they stayed in place (albeit wobbily) until she chose to remove them. (She discovered, though, that two balls was the maximum she could get to stay in the air stream; not enough air got around the first two to suspend the third one, and it inevitably fell.)

The girls took advantage of a demonstration and experiment in the science lab. A gentleman in a lab coat had these supplies laid out and instructed the children how to use the rubber banded popsicle sticks to pick up the random items from the tray and place them in the bowl. One pair of sticks was banded near the middle; the other was banded near the end. The point was to decide how the size of a bird's beak (wide-opening jaw vs. narrow-opening jaw) affects the kinds and amounts of food that it can eat. (Stopwatches were provided, too, so that each child could control for time in the experiment: how much "food" can each "bird" pick up and put into the bowl in the same amount of time?)

Abigail conducting her experiment.

One of the museum's permanent exhibits is its Imagination Playground, one section of which is Rainbow Farm. Here the girls pose amongst the (oversized plastic and metal) corn.

Another section of Imagination Playground is Little Market, a faux grocery store with shelves stocked with cans, plastic fruits and vegetables, and other toy food arranged as it would be in a real grocery store. As new kids approach the market, they're free to grab a cart and go shopping or to grab an employee apron and start working. Here's Suzanna in her apron weighing produce. Later she willingly started restocking shelves, replacing the food toys that others had taken off as customers but then just left behind at the counter. We saw several kids, in fact, doing the same: putting on aprons, looking around for employee-ish chores to do, and then doing them as though it were really their job!

Here's Abigail scanning bar codes on cans and containers at the register in the check-out lane. (But where is her apron?! Imposter!)

Hillary put herself in charge of the bakery. She looks almost as though she's defending the bread against potential pastry pilferers!

As you can probably tell, the museum was a very good time. Sandy then drove us around downtown Omaha to see some of the sights. We ate dinner at Delice European Bakery, where we ordered just a few items and then shared them (it was a late meal, and we wanted to save room for supper): ricotta pie, tarragon chicken salad croissant, and a mushroom tart--all delicious. Afterward we spied a MaggieMoo's ice cream shoppe and treated ourselves to dessert. I discovered their Better Batter ice cream flavor--a creamy base with yellow cake mix in it. It tastes like licking the bowl when baking a cake, only better. Then we spent some time walking around, browsing the shops, and--of course--posing for photos:


On our way back to her house, Sandy pointed out highlights around Omaha along our route. We made a stop at Panera Bread to pick up bagels for tomorrow's breakfast (Sandy assures us that they're the best bagels; I ordered a cinnamon crunch bagel, which has cinnamon and vanilla chips in the dough and a cinnamon and sugar shell on the outside). We stopped by a mall, too, to do some shopping: Susan and Sandy took advantage of sales at Bath and Body Works for pretty-smelling soaps and body sprays; I found a tripod for our Flip Ultra at Sears; and we spied Build-a-Bear Workshop and just had to go check it out.

It's a stuff-it-yourself teddy bear store, and the girls were eager to see what it was all about. It was difficult not to notice their eager wide eyes, so Susan and I asked them if they'd like to build their own bears as a souvenir from this trip, and they were unanimous in jumping up and down and replying, "Yes, please!!!" The employee was great with the girls, walking them through the process of choosing an empty bear (from several available styles), operating the bear-stuffing machine, selecting a satin heart and preparing it (making a wish on it, whispering to it, kissing it, etc.) before slipping it inside the bear and then stitching it up, fluffing and dressing the bear, and using a computer station to name the bear and print out its birth certificate. Once we got to Sandy's, we persuaded the girls to leave their Build-a-Bears in the vehicle so as not to tempt to teeth and claws of Sandy's kitties, and the girls agreed . . . but they had to go out to the garage and spend some time saying goodnight to the bears before they themselves could turn in for the night. Sweet!

Here they are making a wish while clutching each bear's heart, getting ready to tuck the heart inside the bear's stuffing and stitch it up.

Suzanna and Coda

Abigail and Banana

Hillary and Sophie

We did some quick grocery shopping for supper and then got back to Sandy's. The girls were handy and watered Sandy's plants while supper was being prepared. Sandy made us a Mexican dish with chicken that's kind of a cross between enchilladas and burritos (enchillitos? burrilladas?). And, of course, there was glorified rice (Mexico meets Scandinavia). Tomorrow: water park!

P.S. Read my sister's version of today!