Flint Children's Museum review

Over the past few months, Hubby and I have discovered the joy of taking the boys to visit children's museums. We've gone to the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum as well as Impressions 5 in Lansing.

The people at the Flint Children's Museum were very kind and sent me a free pass so we could bring the boys for a day and see what we thought about it. We didn't manage to find time to go while Hubby was off work for the holidays, so my best friend and I went on a recent weekday, and took her son Brennan, who is one of Logan's good friends.

We arrived at the museum and I'm sorry to say we were not met with a very warm welcome from the staff member that was manning the desk. She gave us the distinct impression that she would rather we were not there at all, and she seemed to dislike children in general. Maybe it was just us, though. Anyway, we entered thinking that maybe it wasn't a very good idea to come there after all.

Once we got inside, though, the boys had a lot of fun. The exhibits in the first room were not what my friend and I would call very exciting, but the boys thought otherwise. They could have spent the whole day in there checking things out and dropping golf balls into the various gravity devices. We let them play for a while and then gently nudged them onward so we could see what the rest of the museum had to offer.

Here are Logan and Brennan with one of the exhibits in the first room.



There was a fairy tale area with different stations the kids could do different fairy tale-themed activities. Logan had fun decorating a gingerbread man and "baking him."



And then the boys took turns pelting each other with stuffed cows using the cow catapult.



We continued on to check out the rest of the museum and were pleased to find that there was plenty to keep the boys occupied.

There was a neat musical floor,



a climbing wall,



and a really cool mini town area where the boys could do things like driving a fire truck, helicopter or bus. Here they are pretending to drive a bus.



There was a specified area that smaller children like Jordan could explore, but we couldn't get anywhere near it because there was a huge group of parents and kids taking up the whole space. I think they had rented one of the meeting rooms for some sort of a get-together. I wish we had been able to at least see what the baby area was like, though.

However, Jordan had a great time exploring in the mini town. He found a small step to practice climbing up.



Then he'd check out the street signs for a minute and head back over to the step.





Where he'd crawl down and, most times, fall on his face.



He didn't care, though. He'd just turn around and do it over and over again. He thought it was fun.

He also liked looking at the other exhibits with his big brother.



I was impressed with the number of staff members they had monitoring the museum floor, for how relatively small the museum is. The bigger museums we had visited didn't have nearly as many staffers walking around. Perhaps we just noticed the staff in Flint more because it was pretty quiet in there on a Wednesday afternoon, aside from the group in the baby zone.

So, despite not feeling very welcome when we arrived, we did have an enjoyable time at the museum. It's the closest one to our house, and we will definitely visit again. My friend and I even discussed having our kids' birthday parties there sometime.

Click here to visit the Flint Children's Museum website for more information.