Philly "Please Touch" Muesum

Aug.11-Aug. 17, 2008
We’ve been meeting other mom’s from church for a little playgroup over at Markward park on Mondays. It was fun because Trini (from Chile) also showed up with her boys Diego and Mauricio and Isaac played “restaurante” with Mauricio in Spanish.
The boys were actually fairly tranquilo through storytime on Tuesday at the library, but after the 3rd book their attention span started to wander—actually almost all of the kids attention spans started to wander and the place was descending into total chaos by the time the sweet little grandma librarian got the hint and finished things up instead of finishing the two extra books she’d brought. The Spanish kid’s book selection at the library is great, but the dvd selection is pretty sparse.
We went to the Please Touch Museum (the children’s museum of Philadelphia) on Wednesday and Isaac and Levi were in heaven. It’s the best kid’s museum I’ve ever been to. Houston and San Diego had good ones, but this one is pretty awesome. There’s a pretend shopping area, a big Alice in Wonderland fun zone, a construction area where the kids can use plastic hammers, nails and paint rollers to fix up a house, a big boat that rocks up and down, a water table with little boats, a train table, a building block area, a giant ball toy, a sports zone, a pretend house, etc. Isaac’s favorite so far is the shopping area. He loves being in charge of filling up the shopping cart. Levi’s favorite is the Alice in Wonderland zone where he likes to run around giggling as he opens the different sized doors in the looking glass hallway.
We ended up back at the Please Touch Museum on Thursday and Saturday (James was gone most of Saturday doing a Wharton service project building a Kaboom playground, so we needed a good distraction).
On Friday we went to another amazing place in Philadelphia called the Smith Play House. Its an old Victorian style home in Fairmount park that is filled with toys on the outside and surrounded by fun playground equipment in the outside. There are some fun old fashioned things like a giant wooden slide that you go down on gunny sacks. Isaac and Levi wanted to go down it at least 20 times and then finally we went in the house to play with the toys and I had to drag them away kicking and screaming when it was nap time.
Isaac is making mistakes in English that I remember studying in my language acquisition classes. Sometimes he’ll say, “what did he said?” and “where did we went?” He’ll also overgeneralize irregular verbs that he already knows like “make” and say “maked” instead of “made.” In Spanish he’ll add an extra letter to some words like, “no quiero acompartir” Hanging out with the Chileans has been good for his Spanish. We need to find some more Spanish speaking friends though.
Levi is starting to pick up some Isaac-isms like saying “not”—Isaac likes being very contrary lately and when you make requests like “smile for the picture Isaac” he’ll say “I’m NOT smiling.” It drives me crazy.
We got a cd of Veggie Tales music from the library and Levi is obsessed with it. I don’t know what it is about Veggie Tales that draws his attention so much but he goes nuts over the music, books and movies. He can even say long names like “Larry the cucumber” “Junior Asparagus” and “Madame Blueberry”