National Museum Day

Every year around September is National Museum Day and a lot of cities have a free day to the museums. As a family we decided to take advantage of this day and go and visit four of the seven museums in Fort Worth. Knowing that this super deal would attract a large amount of people we prepared by leaving early and getting to our first museum close to opening time. We also had something else in our corner, rain. Not just a sprinkle, but a down pour. We thought for a moment of not going, but realize going to a museum would be a perfect indoor activity. Because of the rain we arrived at the museum a few minutes after opening, but because of the rain there was hardly anyone there. We went to the children's museum first and we had the museum to ourselves for a good hour before it started to get too crowded. The kids had fun doing science experiments, creating with different art mediums, and putting their imagination to use.

After the children's museum we went over to the National Cowgirl Museum. This museum is more over my kids with very little hands on activities so I saw a good opportunity to go to a museum because there was nothing to lose-it was free. Because of the lack of hands on activities and small size of the museum, it didn't take us long to tour the museum. The kids did have fun riding a mechanical bull and watching a play back tape of them in a pretend rodeo.

After this we decided to brave an art museum. The Kimball Art Museum had a special exhibit going on of Mayan art and we thought Anthony out of all of our kids might enjoy looking at the art. Well lets just say our vision didn't go as planned, but it is a good thing that it was free. The museum was quiet as a library and so every noise our kids made was magnified. We got several looks by other patrons as we tried to describe the various art pieces to our children, and I think Spencer gave several of the museum workers heart attacks because of his close proximaty to the art work. Lets just say we quickly toured the museum and moved on before we annoyed too many people by bringing three children to an art museum.

We ended our tour at the Log Cabin Village. By this time the rain had stopped which was good because this museum is all out doors. The museum consists of a handful of restored log cabins and they are set up that you can go and look inside and learn about how life was in the 1800s. The kids were able to learn how to make candles, how to blacksmith, how the corn mills worked, and how the women took wool and turn it into string/yarn. The kids really enjoyed their visit and learning about how many of their ancestors lived. I was pleased at how kid friendly the Log Cabin Village was.

By this time it was late afternoon and we had spent five hours tour the museums of Fort Worth, as parents we were successful at wearing out the kids and having a good time together as a family. I think this will be a new tradition that we will do every year.