"Tuesday's Visit to Madison's Children's Museum....."

When Don and I told our neighbor Charlie that we planned on taking the kids to Madison's Children's Museum (http://www.madisonchildrensmuseum.org), she asked to go with us and take Griffin, but also offered to "take us as her guests", as they have a membership at the museum!  How nice, eh?

So late Tuesday morning, the 7 of us went to the museum.  Here are Don, me, and Griffin, waiting to take the elevator up to the museum's rooftop.

As you can tell from the photo, we had a bright and sunny day to enjoy the rooftop displays.  Here are Julie, Abigail, Charlie, and Griffin outside of the rooftop Discovery Center.  The Center had newly hatched chicks, which the kids were able to hold and pet, plus some other "hands on" things to explore.

With the Discovery Center in the background, Abigail and I pose for a photo in the shade of a HUGE metal "fowl-like"(although with 4 legs) sculpture.

Here is Don in a photo with a better view of the sculpture.  This photo also gives you a view of the chicken and pigeon coop on the left.  The wooden box to the right of Don in the photo is a solar oven. It had a omelet baking in it, which, of course, was made with eggs from the museum's chickens and seasoned with herbs from their rooftop garden.

The Discovery Center's attendants occasionally take out one of the hens from the coop and allowed it some "outside time".  Not only does this give the chicken some nice exercise, but also allows it to interact with the museum's attendees.

As we wandered the paths of the rooftop garden, I took this photo of Don under an arbor made from some sort of evergreen tree.  The trees are being trained to grow in the arbor formation by intertwining them together and with a curved metal bar structure.  I would LOVE to have such a structure in our yard, but at our house, it does not seem feasible with our almost fully shade yard.

Of course the garden of a children's museum HAS to have a structure for "kids" to climb on, right?   ;)

Tomorrow, some photos from inside the Madison's Children's Museum.