Oak Lawn Children's Museum

On March 25th, we went to a new children's museum, at least new to us. The Oak Lawn Children's Museum is only ten minutes from my mom's new house. I had been wanting to check it out for some time, particularly now that it's so close to my mom's house and will make for a great place to go when the weather gets colder later in the year.

Like I said, it's a ten minute drive from my mom's house, although we wound up getting a little lost. I had written down the wrong directions, but thanks to cell phones, we made it there pretty quickly. The wind was horrendous that day, bitterly cold and leaving my sensitive skin cut and and bleeding (on my hands, that is). We had to park at the top of the parking garage, and it seemed like it took forever to get the kids in the building, but once we were inside, I was pleasantly surprised.

The place is not quite as large as the DuPage Children's Museum, but it has many exhibits you'd only find at the Chicago Children's Museum or Khol's Children's Museum, and a few unique to this museum as well.

After running around a bit just to take in everything, they settled first on visiting the pretend store. Khol's Children's has an awesome pretend store, and although this one was only about a third of its size, it still was a huge hit with the kids, especially Alexa.

She absolutely loved playing cashier (I've got to put a cash register machine on her wish list!) with the other kids. The Khol's museum has a scanner that actually beeps, but it still was fun for her to take the other children's money and help them check out.  Even Grammy got in on the action.

Jared had more fun with me downstairs rolling golf balls down an angled surface....

...and watching pennies spin down the funnel.

Alexa spent quite a bit of time play veterinarian. She loved putting the stuffed dogs on the scale, listening to their heartbeats with the stethoscope and putting them back in their cages.

They both had fun playing at the water table. There was also a sand table that looked really cool, but we didn't get to it on this trip.

While my mom stayed downstairs with Jared, Alexa and I went back upstairs for some more pretend play with costumes and puppets. I'd highly recommend this museum. It's not that big, but there is just enough variety to please most all kids.