Creative Discovery Museum – Travel Journal

Happy Veteran’s Day y’all!  Thank you so much to all the heroes who served our country…your sacrifice is something we will never forget.

Now let’s get back to our other big adventure in Chattanooga.  It was hitting up the Creative Discovery Museum.  I gotta preface this entire post with – the whole point of our trip to Chattanooga was to visit with Jeremy’s mom.  We just haven’t gotten to be with her as much this year (we were preggo, she was injured and then summer flew by) and we really wanted to do a fall activity with her.  Next year I hope we get to go on a beach vacation with her….because she hasn’t gotten to see these little ones in the sand and I know she would love it.  Hopefully by then, Max will outgrow some of his angsty beach feelings.  Dude it’s not so bad 🙂

So anyhoo….we got up there and planned for us all to go to the Creative Discovery Museum.  We had heard so many great things and Jeremy’s mom asked for the day off and was ready to go.  The morning of the big adventure, Jeremy rolls over and tells me that he is gonna go throw up and he can’t come.  Um.  What?!

Yup.  My main squeeze had caught a stomach bug and wasn’t able to move.  Unless it was in the general direction of the bathroom.

I basically slammed on my mental brakes and had to reconfigure our entire adventure.  I am not the type to take the kids alone to a children’s museum.  Grocery store?  Absolutely.  Target?  On occasion.  Clothing shopping?  Only if absolutely necessary.  But traveling and exploring a strange city and an unknown place with four small Bowers without Jeremy is a foreign notion.  I probably would have just cancelled the adventure completely but knowing that GrandBee would be there to help made me feel at ease and so I loaded up the kiddos and we forged ahead….with lots and lots of wipes and diapers.

This museum is SOOOOO cool.  We have been to quite a few different museums for kids and I would definitely say that this one ranks REALLY high on arts and imagination.

Weston’s favorite area was definitely the water tables.  He was a regular sailor….navigating those walls and making his little boat sail down his brother’s booby-traps 🙂

You might say he really soaked it all in…. (cheese alert!)

LJ slept through the first twenty minutes of the trip and once he woke up, I would say his favorite part was also the water.  When we left, he definitely needed a change of overalls 🙂

A lot of museums have pretend areas – with  grocery stores and vet offices and places you can pretend to be a doctor or mechanic.  This one only had a couple of those and I appreciated that diversity.

Weston was the only one that sat down with me and did the Spoon Creatures.  He liked making the little sticker choices and I felt like this was a really great project.  I think I might actually do it with Will and LJ and Weston again at home.

Will loved this junk contraption.  It was made with all trash items.  You put the basketball in the trough that pushed it into the baby pool with a roller skate and then you used a pulley system to force it down a ramp to make a basket.

The dinosaur and critters area was really fun for the kids.

Weston and LJ are fearless when it comes to bugs….which is so weird since Will never got into them.  He still won’t touch certain bugs.  And Weston comes over and tries to eat it, squish it, put it on his brother, put it in his pocket, etc.

Weston really liked the fossils too…Will just kept asking if it was real or not real.

My little prehistoric animal hunters 🙂

There was an area with sand where you could hunt for dinosaur bones.  Weston decided that he would prefer to make sand-cakes.  That last one has candles in it.

My favorite area was the arts area.  It had a music recording studio, instrument rooms, a theatre with working lights, sound effects and costumes.  We put on a small show for GrandBee where Will, the Superhero, was injured and the fireman Weston and the paramedic Katie had to help him.  It was the show of the century.  I think it might be on Broadway soon.

The instruments in the foyer area were HUGE and if you all held the buttons down, each instrument played it’s part of a song.  So if you held all the buttons down, you could figure out the song because you could hear the melody.  I kept trying to explain what it was like to my mom because I knew she would have loved this section 🙂

The boys just liked the fact that there were buttons 🙂

Isn’t this a cute art idea?  Just repetitive stamped artwork in frames.  The butterfly one and the cow one are my jam.

There was also an art area but I feel like it was geared toward older kids (ya know…ones that could hold a pencil correctly) so we didn’t spend a ton of time in there.

Upstairs there is another area with pretend gardens and kayaks and a climbing wall.

That is also where you can access the outside.

The coolest thing is that on the roof they have a real bee hive!  You can see it through a giant window and the bees are inside a glass case so you can see what all the buzz is about (sorry…had to.)

It’s so cool.  I think I might buy a plasma ball for Cole this year.  He would like it 🙂

THIS.  This was my favorite.

After we got back in the car (WE SURVIVED! Only one mishap where LJ tried to escape.  Via the elevator.  With Weston assisting him.) we headed back to GrandBee’s house and then picked up Jeremy.  It was so nice that she still wanted to experience the chaos even without her firstborn!  I know that she LOVES seeing Jeremy but her four grand babies kept her busy!

The overall adventure was really fun.  I definitely recommend it if you have little ones and are planning a trip to Chattanooga.  Plus, it’s really close to restaurants and other attractions so you can do multiple things in one day.

Will has already asked if we can go back.  I keep telling him that it’s kinda far away to visit frequently 🙂

We actually left that night to go home.  Jeremy was feeling a little better and I started to feel a bit of nausea so we packed up the kids and headed home.  Then LJ got sick in the car.  Yeah.  Not exactly what every girl dreams about…..cleaning up baby vomit in a gas station bathroom.  Needless to say, we were really glad to arrive at home that night.

I’m sure you all wanted to hear all that, didn’t you?

But since I kinda keep these personal adventure posts more journal-style, I had to share the good, the bad, and the smelly.

This week we are heading out of town – just Jeremy and Max and I!  We got invited by Rust-Oleum to an educational event in Asheville and yes, I am more excited to talk about stain than any normal human should be.  Also…I am excited that there will only be 1/3 of the diapers to change 🙂  Thanks mom and dad!

We are super excited to attempt our first Periscope too.  So keep that in mind if you want to see us LIVE and in real time.  You will have to upload the Periscope app and follow us @bowerpowerblog (we have like four followers right now and I think one of them is a rando guy who wants to see boobs) so hop on over…make sure you get notifications turned ON so that you don’t miss our Scopes and please don’t judge us for being weird on there!

Hope you guys have a wonderful day and if you are a veteran – thanks again.  I owe you a big handshake, a cup of coffee and more than we’ll ever know 🙂