A long weekend

With the kids and myself both being off from school and work we decided to do something rather spontaneous this weekend. We started looking at going to Chicago, Kansas City, or Minneapolis, but decided that we hadn’t really experienced Omaha yet. But rather than “commute” in we decided to put a real “vacation” kind of spin on it and we got a hotel room, put on our loudest tourist outfits, and packed some bags for the road.

The kids were excited to spend the night in the hotel and it helped up the excitement for the next day. We went to the Omaha Children Museum. They had several really fun exhibits, one was a series of integrated devices, pathways, and catching systems that you could put in balls and they would circulate and trigger other chain reactions. It was a blast and we had to drag Asher out of there in order to see different exhibits.

The kids all got to ride a home-made hover craft and seemed to enjoy it. There was a stop-frame-motion animation station, a tandem-bike that measured horsepower and miles per hour, and even pinewood derby-like setup where the kids could make a car from Lego’s and race it.

One of the funner exhibits for the older boys was a “gun” that shot a penny, which you of course provided, and it smashed into a wall and depending on the metals inside it would deform or shatter in some way. It was really cool to watch. Then we went back to the hotel and played for three hours in their inside water park. Complete with a three story, curly Q water slide, and giant bucket that would fill with water and then dump out on you. It was a blast.

We hit the zoo and an 3D IMAX movie on Saturday, but had to cut it short because Rylan’s coughing and fever became too much for him to bear (poor guy, he was so disappointed), but all in all we had a great day made it home safely Saturday night. We will post some pictures and video shortly.