Rant for the Day

I don't like to complain but sometimes you just gotta.  Maybe it's good for the soul.  A type of catharsis.

Here's my complaint topic for the day. Or moment.  "Kids' museums."

If you're going to be a museum for kids and you're charging people their hard-earned money to take their children there, keep up with the maintenance for Pete's sake so that things are actually in proper working order when kids go there.  Is that too much to ask?

Yesterday, I accompanied my daughter and her class to a trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.  While it's not a "children's" museum per se, it definitely caters to the younger population and giant throngs of school children on field trips.  It's a very cool place, don't get me wrong - but it's frustrating and disappointing when my little group of 9-year-old girls are pulling each other along, giggling and squealing about the next thing they want to try, only to find that despite pushing all the buttons, nothing happens.

Cases in point:

There's a little "show" area where you go inside a curtain and are supposed to see something, apparently.  They came out the other side befuddled and saying "nothing's happening in there."  One of the other chaperones went through as as well and said, "I have no idea."

There's a hands-on activity that's a like a scale and the object of it is to go down a list of lifestyle things that could lead to heart attack and if you do them or have them, you put a black block on one side of the scale and if you do not, you put a white block on the other side and when you're done with the list, you see how much you are at risk.  My daughter was doing the activity (one black block for family history of heart disease) and the rest white blocks (thank you, Lord), but alas, there were not enough white blocks to complete the list.  What up?

"Make a paper airplane or use one from the table" - (in an activity that shoots your paper airplane across the room for you.  There were none on the table.

Being a softball family, we were psyched to see the sports area where they had a pitching mound that would clock your throw.  However the baseball they provided was ripped and the "softball" was more like an oversized tennis ball that a dog had chewed.   Come on, museum people!  That's our sport!  (I still managed to throw a 51 MPH pitch with the flappy baseball and sweet Matilda (or J-bomb, or Moopy Girl, or whatever you want to call her) threw a 33 MPH windmill pitch with the flying fuzz that was the softball.

This museum is very cool, seriously - these were just a few little bumps in the road but we had a great time. It just reminded me so much of Port Discovery at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, where we've taken the kids a couple times.  This *is* a children's museum, 100%.  There were so many broken and missing items in this place, I was thoroughly disgusted at how much we paid to get in vs. the quality of the displays, from missing decorations (there were supposed to be alligators on the floor, which made it fun to try to get across the "river" but some alligators were missing and in their place were just splotches of paint - not quite as fun) to duct taped padding on the climbing structure, to dirty handles and stuff that looked like it hadn't been cleaned or replaced since 1950.  Again, a very cool place but when they charge you that much to enter, it should be in excellent, if not perfect, working order.

Okay, so that's my beef.  Now, on to more important things, like getting J-bird off to school.