Bay Area Freebies

Exploratorium

On the first Wednesday of each month, the Exploratorium offers free admission to the public. We arrived when the museum opened that morning and stayed for three hours. The place was packed, but since we got a good parking spot and expected lots of people, it was exciting anyway.

Dane was fascinated by the "decaying animal" display. Inside a terrarium, a turtle and a white mouse were decaying (at different stages). At a computer terminal, a bird, a mouse, and a rabbit could be viewed during the decaying process at time elapsed rates. Gross but intriguing.

Aubrey wanted to pop the four foot high bubble wall created by a machine. (We saw something similar when we visited the children's museum in Lafayette, LA.)



Habitot

We missed registration for the $15 gingerbread extravaganza held at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) where we have a membership, which was disappointing since the stores had been out of gingerbread kits for a week before I realized it; however, we were relieved to learn that Berkeley's children's museum (almost past visiting ages for our kids, but not quite) had a free day on December 21st. Mick and I took the kids and they helped decorate a giant community gingerbread house (but mostly they ate the frosting) with about two hundred other kids. Then they comandeered rockets and painted their faces.




Santa Comes to Sausalito

Dane and Aubrey and I walked to downtown Sausalito one evening (about 2 miles) to visit Mr. and Mrs. Claus. We even got to take our own pictures. When it was their turn, they stood facing Santa, and Aubrey belted out "I'd like a Hello Kitty cup please. That's all." Dane said he'd like "a train, a car, and a person." (For the record, Santa came through. Aubrey got her Hello Kitty cup and Dane got a Boco--Thomas the Train character--and a remote control race car and a Lego Spiderman to assemble.) Then they sat on Santa's lap for a picture. When they asked where the reindeer were, Mrs. Claus said parking was pretty tough downtown and that they had to leave them in a field a few miles away. We looked for them on the walk home but didn't see them.