Zimmer Children's Museum

Last Friday my husband and I took Baby M to the Zimmer Children's Museum. The goal of the museum is to teach people about global citizenship, community responsibility, and cultural sensitivity through interactive exhibits, some of which have Jewish cultural themes. However the message is pretty subtle. This is not a junior version of the Museum of Tolerance. There are no genocides to ponder or Holocaust victims to mourn, you will have fun at the Zimmer.

In fact we had such a great time at the museum we can't wait to go back. There is a giant pinball machine, an airplane cockpit with working navigational tools, a Main Street area with shops to play in, a dress up theater, a full sized ambulance and a very cool water table. Everything is perfectly scaled to 15 month old Baby M, there is even a bounce room that is restricted to children under 2 years old. Baby M was so happy runnning around the oak tree and looking at the light-up bugs at the entrance to the Main Street exhibit that we literally had to drag him down the street into Bubbie's Bookstore and the Blue Bagel Cafe. Once we had made it through Main Street we ran into more trouble getting him out of the ambulance and away from the water table. (Okay, maybe I was the one who didn't wan't to leave the water table. It's heated and kids can use plastic dams and gates to explore how currents flow. If only they'd had one of these in my Fluid Dynamics class I wouldn't have needed all those cups of coffee to stay awake!)

It 's nice to find a place that is welcoming for younger toddlers. At 15 months Baby M is a pretty good walker, but he still topples over once in awhile and he's short enough that older kids sometimes don't see him. The Zimmer exhibits are safe and interesting for a wide range of kids and seem to be organized in such a way that the older kids don't end up trampling the younger ones. Oh, and one last plus for the Zimmer-- Free Parking!