I Spy, with My Little Eye... the Tampa Children's Museum!

Son One proudly displays his rainbow dinosaur puppet.

This year, the director of Son One's daycare enrolled his class in a program called "iSpy Tampa Bay," which resulted in him obtaining free passes to the Florida Aquarium, the Lowry Park Zoo, and the Glazer Children's Museum... free passes that admit four or five people at a time! (Also it came with a variety of investigative tools like binoculars and magnifying glasses and a notebook to record observations in.) We made a little use of them during the school year, but now that it's summer, we've been trying to use them a lot. A few weeks ago I took the kids to the aquarium; recently, I took the kids (along with my sister, visiting) to the Children's Museum.

The Children's Museum is pretty great; you can spend a whole day there and your kids will never get bored. There's a water area with boats to play with and a series of cranes simulating a working port, a toddler area with various toys, a huge climbing structure, a pretend pizza place and ice cream parlor and grocery store, a theatre for kids to put on shows, a craft area, and much more. We went back in March, and I was happy to note that when we came back three months later, stuff had been changed a little so that it wasn't all the same old.

Son Two assembles Big John for himself.

The big selling point of the museum this time was the addition of Big John the triceratops to their collection, the largest known triceratops skeleton. This is owned by a local businessman, who loaned it to the museum for display for three years. There's a lot of dinosaur-themed stuff to go with it, too, including a thing where kids can color pictures of dinosaurs and scan them in, where they get displayed on a screen as moving 3D models! Son One colored probably ten dinosaurs with his aunt. Unfortunately, you know kids, they were less into the actual skeleton than all the flashy stuff around it, but I had a good time looking at it and talked a bit to the staff member there.

Our zoo pass already expired, but we have until the end of the month to use our aquarium and Children's Museum ones, so we will have to return a few more times very quickly! I think the kids will be up for it; Son One asked to go back to the Children's Museum the very next day.