Museum of Life + Science

On Wednesday Jim took the day off and we all went to the Museum of Life + Science in Durham.  What a cool place!

www.ncmls.org/

At 84 acres we would best describe it as a combination between a zoo, a 3-story science museum, a large outdoor kids museum.   One of the highlights for Jim of course was the train.  It's very similar to the St Louis Zoo train, for those who are familiar with that.  Avery was very anxious to ride it and hated waiting for it.  While it was stopped the engineer let us take our picture on the engine

Notice Avery squirming? She was very impatient!  Once we started moving she loved it.  It went through a dinosaur exhibit, through tunnels, etc.

The dinosaur part was neat.  The train goes by it, but they also have a dinosaur walk, which is a trail through the forest where you can see life size models of the them.  It's amazing how big some of them were when you can see them in real size!  Avery like this smaller dinosaur

She even like petting its tail

Then we went to the zoo part where there are bears, endangered red wolves, lemurs, farm animals, etc.  The bears, lemurs, and red wolves where lounging in the shade so we didn't get good pictures of them.  But we did get pictures of Avery looking at some of the farm animals

Some of the outdoor exhibits are neat.  There is an area to learn about wind, you can power remote control boats (Which Avery waved at and said "boat boat")

And an area where you can make your own sailboat and see if you can get it to move in certain directions based on the wind machine blowing, but Avery just splashed and got herself drenched!

You can make and explore how steam behaves

There is a giant exhibit where you make different seedlings (such as helicopter seeds, etc) out of magnets and felt and the magnets get carried up a large crane where they then float down to see how you did.

It might be hard to tell in the photos what it was all about but it was a huge hit with all the kids there.

There is a noise exhibit where kids can learn about sound.  Avery's favorite part of it was the area where you can bang different objects to hear the different types and pitches they make

She really loved making lots of noise!

There is a butterfly exhibit where you can walk through and butterfly houses with butterflies from each region of the world.  Some of the South American ones were the neatest, they were huge and bright colored!

Connected to that was an insectarium with lots of creepy bugs such as huge weird roaches, beetles, scorpions, etc.  She was a little timid of the black scorpion, but the giant beetles, etc were way creepier than that!  (Jim really liked that area though!)

Avery got to crawl (well, walk since she is so short!) through storm drain pipes

Then we went inside the museum part and quickly saw the geology area (and saw a working seismometer and thought it would have been so cool to see it the day before during the 5.8 tremor in Virginia!  Then we had to head out.  There was so much we didn't see that we have to go back sometime!  The reason we left was we went to pick up an Anywhere Chair that we were buying off of Craigslist.  Avery loves sitting in it at home when Sesame Street is on

After we picked up the Chair we stopped at the Town Commons in Carpenter Village near us and Avery crawled up and down the gazebo

Ran around the huge Bermuda-grass lawn area

And played with sticks, rocks, and iPhones near the pond.

Our favorite photo sequence was of her with sticks, it looks like she is trying to run and pole vault in the sequence!

Then we had a frozen custard at Goodberry's and then went downtown to meet Christine and Charlene for a mini food and beer tasting put on by Living Social.  You got to select a beer and food pairing at three different places.  The food and beer were delicious!  We were saying what a fun random Wednesday it was, and how neat it will be someday when we are retired and that's what we can do on random weekday!

Zoo 5k Run

This morning we went to the NC Zoo to run in the "Run for the Wild" 5k race through the zoo (and we stayed afterwards until Avery decided she was ready for a nap.)

Jim pushed the stroller so he had to start in back.

There was a huge crowd so he got stuck in back for awhile after the race started, but once he got through the pack he sprinted for a full mile to catch up to (and run next to) Colleen who started up front with the regular runners.  It was a really tough course through the zoo, it was very hilly with lots of tight turns on the zoo paths.  The last mile was on a crushed gravel path through the forest which was really neat.

After race there was a 0.1 mile kids fun run (from the 3.0 mile marker to the finish line), and Avery took part.  Based on the crowd at the starting line, she was the youngest one taking part!  (She's in the white top, black pants, left of the kid in green)

She stopped a few times and was more interested in picking up pieces of gravel than continuing on, and she finished last amongst all the kids!  But considering she was only 15 months old, at least she finished!  (Binky in her mouth the whole course, naturally)

She came through the finish chute

 And got a medal for finishing!

(She thought the medal was a cookie and kept trying to eat it!!!)

Then she posed next to the polar bear

and giraffe at the finish line.

We went into the zoo and decided to put the cost of our two admission tickets to obtaining a year long zoo membership since it is reciprocal with 150 zoos and aquariums nationwide (Including the three NC Aquariums we plan on visiting in the next few months with Avery now that she is old enough to enjoy them).

Inside the zoo Avery liked seeing the sea lions right up against the glass!

She also like seeing the polar bear, black bears, and grizzly bears. (She kept waving at them like they were puppies or something nice!)

She watched one of the keepers talk about turtles

And enjoyed a carousel ride.

She also hung out in a giant beehive

She really liked these small mammals called cacomistles.  There were in the Sonoran Desert exhibit, and they were nocturnal in a low-light setting so they were hard to photograph. But they were related to raccoons but much cuter!  She loved watching them play, and we had to stop her from banging on the glass so much!  We'd never heard of them before and they aren't the type of exhibit that is something people usually stop for awhile to see at a zoo, but Avery loved them, who'd have known???

They had two white alligators at the zoo on a temporary exhibit from April - October of this year, very interesting to see.

Then she fell asleep in the stroller right before the elephant exhibit

She really loved the elephants at the DC National Zoo last weekend so it was too bad she fell asleep then!  So since we were tired we headed back to the car and skipped exhibits such as the lions, giraffes, mearcats, chimps, etc.  (we really wanted to see the giraffes because they have 4 different tree level viewing platforms so you can see them at face level, neat!  We'll save all of those for the next visit!