MSI Chicago- only the best museum EVER!

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is now our very favorite museum EVER! We loved it so much we returned only two days later! Not only is it the most interactive museum we've been to, it holds some very significant pieces of history, namely the Pioneer Zephyr train, Apollo 8 and the U-505! (The U-505 will be explained in a separate post!)

We toured the Pioneer Zephyr, the first train to incorporate three state of the art technologies when it was built in 1934; a stainless steel, streamlined body powered by a diesel-electric engine. It debuted at the Chicago World's Fair after it's first run from Colorado, hitting a top speed of 112mph and cutting the travel time for that route nearly in half!

Journey and her shadow walking alongside the train. 

One of the cars belonged to the postal service so bags of mail fill this compartment.

Interactive displays alongside the train show how different parts of the train work.

The actual Apollo 8, the first spacecraft to take men around the moon and back in 1968, is on display here. It took 3 days just to travel from earth to the moon. During their week in space, the 3 men orbited the moon 10 times and completed 6 television broadcasts before landing in the Pacific Ocean and being retrieved by the Navy. 

An autographed print of the famous photo the astronauts took of 

Earthrise, deemed one of the top 100 photos of the century by Life Magazine. 

My little astronaut

Practicing launching rockets with different amounts of energy. 

This circus section was fun. When you step on a light it plays a tone, so 

the kids were jumping and running thru the lights to make music. Too cute!

When you stand in front of this wall, virtual butterflies will land on your shadow! We loved this!

The genetics wing was one of my favorites. They have cloned mice on display and explain in detail how they were created. They take an egg from a mouse, remove the nucleus and replace it with the nucleus from a cell of a different mouse's tail. They fertilize and "activate" it and transfer the embryo into a surrogate mouse. The process is very unsuccessful. It takes many tries, like hundreds, for just one baby to be born.

This is a live frog, under a black light. They successfully transplanted a jellyfish gene into the DNA of the frog to make its eyes glow!

The chick hatchery lets you watch babies peck their way out of their

eggs on one side while slightly older chicks run around on the other. 

And then there was the water room!

Field Museum and Adler Planetarium

The kids have been watching a lot of "Night at the Museum" and I thought the movie was based from Chicago's Field Museum. (I later found out that's a museum in NY.) Anyway they still had fun with Sue the dinosaur that sure looks like the one in the movie as well as looking for other characters from the movie. They did find the monkey, but did not find the "Yum Yum Gum Gum" guy which was disappointing for them. We would have found the mummies upstairs, however while this place is very interesting for adults who can read, it's not as exciting for kids who can't and just want to touch, climb and push buttons, so unfortunately we ended up leaving before seeing the whole place.

The Ancient Americas exhibit was my favorite, if only I had time to read about each of these items...

  Carved fish hooks and clubs

By this time, the kids were antsy, so we walked down to the Adler Planetarium. With only 45 minutes until close, we rushed thru to the most interesting exhibits and the kids area.

This is an actual rock collected from the moon's surface by Apollo 15 in 1971!

They "launched" space shuttles,

peaked at the rovers,

...and cried when we had to leave.  

They did enjoy the views of downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan 

on our way back to our truck though, who wouldn't?!

Lake County Museum, Wauconda, Illinois

One of my MOM friends, Liz, along with her husband and kids, met us at the Lake County Museum in Wauconda. Her twin boys, Camden and Dean, were due the same month as mine.  Even though we've been interacting online since we were pregnant (over 4 years ago), it's the first time I've met her family and only the second time I've seen her in person. She came out to Vegas a couple years ago for our wild and crazy MOM getaway. It was really nice meeting her husband, twins and new baby, Milo.

This is a small museum with a gallery of Presidential photos that were very intriguing regardless of your political affiliations. It also holds a display explaining the history of the postcard as well as an archive holding, I believe, millions of postcards. The most interesting part for me was learning about Curt Teich, a German immigrant who came to America and started his own post card business. He took a train from Chicago and headed west, stopping to photograph each of the different towns along the way and sell his prints as postcards to the local shops. He sold packs of 1000 cards for $1. He sold $30,000 worth in just 90 days! The shops then sold those cards for 1 penny each and the cost to mail them in 1905? Just one more penny!

They found the playroom:

The museum is surrounded by lakes and nature trails which makes it extra fun when you explore outside after seeing the indoor exhibits.

The boys ended up throwing stones in the lake, of course. 

 Afterwards we enjoyed lunch at Lindy's Landing at a table ON the beach! So fun and perfect for the kids to play instead of having to sit thru the whole lunch.

Then it was time to say goodbye to their new friends, with hugs.