Friday, December 17, 2010

Perfect Family Gift

If you're looking for the perfect gift to give any family this holiday season, I suggest a family membership to a local children's museum [or something of similar nature]. Although they can be pricey, it's a gift for the whole family can enjoy. Plus, if you know this family is all about deals you can rest assured those parents will make your dollar stretch. 

Over the years we've owned memberships to Imagine It Children's Museum, Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta Zoo, DAC kids [indoor play], Monkey Joe's [bounce house], and our local water park, White Water. I love when someone buys us a gift certificate or passes to any of those because it not only gives the kids something educational and fun to do, but gives me a break from coming up with something to entertain them with every week. Even if it's a slow month I know we can still go do something fun as a family because it's already paid for.

By checking into cheaper parking options, [validated parking or season parking pass] and bringing a sack lunch you can make it a day of fun [any day of the year!] for nearly free.

If your kids already have too many toys I suggest making this the one family Christmas gift or pull all your kids Christmas money together to buy one gift everyone can enjoy...quality time together.

I'm busying organizing, cleaning, and packing for our move back to GA this weekend, but I wanted to share some pictures of our trip to the Boonshoft [Children's] Museum of Discovery from Tuesday. I'm now wishing we had gone sooner [and more often like planned since my ATL membership included the museum here in Dayton], but better late than never. My best friend April [who is a flight attendant] had a Dayton lay over so she was gracious enough to accompany us.


It was way nicer and larger than the one in Atlanta [which is still nice]. This was two stores of different rooms with different subjects and themes. Even a three story mesh-net-slide-playground in the middle. They had a water system you could play in from one end of the downstairs to the other. It also had an amazing room of balls and another with different types of cars you could ride in.


There were several science & math rooms [puzzles, microscopes, shadows, space station, etc.] I particularly liked the dinosaur excavation center where they could uncover dinosaur bones.


They had several houses, an animal hospital, grocery store, recycle center, lego tables [and exhibits], a room full of hundreds of animal artifacts you could touch and even real animals. Moses wasn't a fan of the log cabin house with pretend pot- over-the-fire-stove...but I was. They also had a small aquarium section that allowed  for touching the marine life. One room talked about climates and had a hot and cold room you could play in.

We spent a little over two hours there and hardly saw or played with it all, but I forgot my own suggestion of bringing a sack lunch and they didn't have any food there. Unless you count vending machines, which I don't. Speaking of food...

My favorite exhibit [I didn't get any pictures of] was a full size pizza restaurant. Complete with oven, pretend pizza ingredients and pizza boxes. You could order from the counter, make the pizza, cook the pizza, waitress the pizza to the table or even deliver the pizza in a life size pizza delivery car.

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2 comments:

  1. Great gift suggestion! This children's museum looks awesome!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I LOVE this! I wish we had more places like these where I live. It's so hard to entertain a spirited toddler!

    ;) Thanks for stopping by my blog.

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