Imagine It!

We celebrated Father's Day a couple weekends ago by spending Saturday as a family and taking the kids to the pool and just having a great relaxing day together. Angie spoiled me with an awesome breakfast of biscuits with sausage gravy and a big helping of bacon. (I'm kind of a health nut if you can't tell.) It was a perfect day of just hanging out together, playing games with the kids and being silly.

The following day, we celebrated Father's Day with my family at Imagine It! Children's Museum. We've been wanting to take the kids there forever and just never got around to it. I didn't really know what to expect because I hadn't heard that much about it other than it existed and we should go. It turned out to be the perfect place to spend the day. Like, perfect. The whole place is basically a bunch of different play areas with different themes and the kids are at the perfect age to explore them all. Let me take you on a tour...

We started by the pretend cow you could milk, the tractor you could sit on and the shopping area. The shopping area was the big hit in this section. The kids got mini shopping carts and got to go through a mini store, picking food off the shelves and then check out. We were amazed at how much they loved pretend shopping. Angie and I considered sitting in their pretend carts and then pulling each other's hair and poking each other after ten minutes of shopping to see if they still enjoyed it, but we figured they'll have that fun when they have kids someday :)

The next play area was a little magnetic fishing pond with some tunnels and bridges to play on. Maddy, of course, loved putting her hands in the water then patting her face like she's washing up. Patrick was happy he got to wear a fireman rain coat and had a very interesting fishing style. He basically just picked the fish up with his hand, stuck on the magnet fishing pole then said "Got it!". And Carson looked SO CUTE in her little green rain coat!

Then we got to be goalies in virtual soccer. Ok, I played goalie in virtual soccer. But, here's the thing, when I placed first (not bragging, just saying, I'm pretty good at virtual soccer. All I'm saying is, you roll a virtual ball at me, I'm gonna block it. No big deal.) and they showed the leader board of the top ten scores, ALL OF THEM were adults. NO kids are playing this. Or, if they are, they're terrible at it and need to step up their goalie game.

I get my own picture because it's Father's Day

Aaaanyway, the next stop was the sand table. The little girls LOVED this table. Carson and Maddy probably would have spent the day there if we let them. Carson was so fun to watch. If you know Carson, you know she's very careful and clean. Getting messy is not at the top of her list of things to do. For a while, she would only touch the sand with the various sand tools they had but was loving it. Eventually she put her whole hand in though and was SO proud of herself. She had the sweetest smile as she looked around to see if everybody saw. After that, she was game for getting some sand on her, which is good because I'm pretty sure Madelyn covered half the people at the table in sand as she threw it around and dug through it. 

While the girls were playing in the sand table, Patrick discovered heaven on earth. He discovered an area that was completely dedicated to a gigantic train set. We probably could have gone home, taken a nap and come back a few hours later and he wouldn't have even noticed. As soon as a train was in his hand, he was in the zone. He started making up involved stories about the trains and using every train he could find to be in his story.

The last stop was this giant ball moving contraption. It's hard to explain. Just think of it like a big version of the game Mouse Trap but without the mice. This area also just had some smaller spaces within it to play around.

When we left the museum it was lunch time so we headed to Johnny Rockets across the street. Patrick had his very first chocolate shake and mini juke box experience. He was a little more excited about the shake though :)

It was a great weekend. Times together like this remind me how lucky I am to be a Dad. Here's a slideshow with some more pictures of the day. There were a ton of cute ones of the three kids but I obviously couldn't put them all in here. So if you like cute pictures of kids you should definitely check them all out.