Midwest Road Trip: KC

On our second day in Kansas City, we spent our time in the downtown area. We loved exploring this City of Fountains.

Photo credit goes to Jaden!

Our first stop in the morning was visiting Kaleidoscope, a unique children's museum also known as a hands-on young artists' center. The museum hosts free Creative Art Sessions where they encourage kids to be creative with leftover art materials (ribbons, paper, stickers, bags, etc) from Hallmark Company's manufacturing processes. Overall, our normally creative boys didn't enjoy the experience quite as much as we thought they might, but since it was free, we had nothing to lose!

Jaden and Cody's favorite station was designing a picture on cardstock and then sending their creation through a puzzle-making machine.

 We also liked this black-light room where the boys could color with glow-in-dark markers and melted crayon. This process turned out to be a little difficult but the product looked very cool!

Even Adley made a few artistic creations. Yes, she was very focused the whole time. :)

After our hour-long creative art session, we were off to Union Station. Simply walking through this large building and appreciating its size and architecture was enjoyable, at least for Amy and Jason!

Some friends clued us into this model train exhibit in the back rooms of Union Station. It was kind of in an out of the way location, so I'm not sure we would have found it otherwise!

Jaden and Cody were particularly impressed with the LEGO displays-- an entire Wild West scene and a whole town complete with an amusement park. Amazing!

Outside of Union Station, we got to see a train pass through with dozens of flatbed cars carrying humongous wind turbine propellers. This was especially interesting for our family since we had seen many wind turbine farms from the car only a couple days earlier.

Our family's favorite part of the day, though, was visiting Science City, a children's science museum inside Union Station. We loved the wide variety of hands-on exhibits and stayed there for several hours. Most of these pictures below will speak for themselves regarding the fun activities we did...

We loved this optical illusion exhibit! I wasn't quite at the right angle for the photo, but you can get the general idea. :)

Cody and Jaden stayed at this block-building exhibit for a LONG time, working on a "secret fort." They were very proud of their finished fort.

Adley found a few fun toddler-friendly exhibits with Daddy while the boys were busy with their blocks.

We loved that so many of the exhibits involved climbing and moving and running. What a perfect spot for our active bunch of kiddos!

Science City even included a section of exhibits outdoors. Can you find Jaden on the unique climbing structure in the two pictures below?

In case you missed him, Jaden is waving at the very top!

Jaden rode on this sphere for quite a while and even attempted spinning it a few times too.

Meanwhile, Cody stood in line several times for this long zip line.

One of the last exhibits we did was this cool dinosaur excavation site.

At the very end of our day, we attended a show in the planetarium. We visited at just the right time to see a Magic Tree House-themed show. The boys loved it! They had never been inside a planetarium before. It was easily their favorite part of the whole day.

We were very glad that we visited this museum and Union Station in general. What a great day!