Fun at the Franklin Institute

Vince has been very sick the last few days.  He's been cuddled against Mommy with a 103 degree fever, total sinus congestion, and all sorts of little aches since Saturday afternoon.  My poor baby!

He's starting to feel a bit more like himself, thank God.  

Before he came down with this nasty little bug, I had taken him to The Franklin Institute for the first time!  Since John was off meeting one of his childhood idols that day, I got to spend a whole day with my little munch - something we haven't really done in a while.  

So I packed him up and took him into Philly to explore the Institute.

For those of you who have never been, it's a great place for kids to get hands on experience with science in action.  They've got rooms set up to tackle topics like global weather patterns, static electricity, the circulatory system and aviation.  My favorite part of the Institute has always been the planetarium.  Vince enjoyed looking at the planets and seeing a brief video about black holes, but he was more interested in the train room.  In the train room, there are real locomotives that you can climb aboard and look at.  Vince must've climbed aboard at least a dozen times!  He even got to try his hand at turning one of the giant wheels!

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He also got a big kick out of the circulatory room.  This room is probably the most famous one the Institute has simply based on the "maze" they have that follows the path blood takes through the human heart.  It's a massive exhibit that allows you to walk through a model heart... tracing your way through arteries, the lungs and eventually veins and back through the heart again.  Vince was scared of the heart, but he adored the exercise equipment that showed you how you could "get your heart racing" in order to promote good health!

If only I could reach the pedals!!!

He wasn't too fond of the aviation room.  At first he was a little afraid of all the wind tunnels and noises of jet engines, but once I plopped him into the pilot seat of the old plane they've got hanging from the ceiling, he changed his tune a bit.  :)

Once we finished in the aviation room, we stopped to get a quick bite to eat in the atrium.  This served to fuel the little munch for his romp in the Sports Center!  I let him take the marble steps instead of the elevator so I could show him the huge pendulum swinging down through three flights of spiraling stairs.  The pendulum swings due to the motion of the earth.  Every morning, dominoes are set up in a perfect circle around the pendulum.  As the day progresses, the tilt of the earth causes the pendulum to switch direction almost imperceptibly.  The tiles get knocked down little by little as the pendulum shifts to account for the spin of the earth.  Vince got a kick out of seeing it!

However, he enjoyed running up the stairs a lot more.  Maybe he felt like Rocky Balboa!

The sports room is probably where he had the most fun.  I got several fun shots of him playing around in there!  All over are jerseys of sports celebrities, footprints of basketball players and various statistics of some of Philadelphia's best loved athletes.  Vince didn't much care about any of that.  He just wanted to play on all the cool stuff!  

However, even having all that fun in the sports room, he still wanted to head back to the trains.  So, we headed back to the trains to have some more fun on the old locomotives!

So yeah - as you can see God was very good to give us this fun little adventure before his little body got caught up in this whole being sick business.  I keep telling him that when he gets better, we'll go back and see the trains again.  Without fail he forgets he's sick and smiles so big!  He really loves those trains!

If any of you are ever in the area, the Franklin Institute is a great place to stop by (even if you don't have kids!).  A few weeks ago, some friends and I attended one of their traveling exhibits - the Titanic.  Last year it was the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This spring I'm taking John to see one about Spies and all the different spy gadgets governments have created over the years.  

It's really such a great place and I can't wait to take Vince again when he's feeling better!