At KCDC With Michael's Family

Today I took the kids to the Kansas Children's Discovery Center in Topeka.  I called up my good friend Michael (whom I know from my Actuate days) to see if he wanted to join us.  He was free, so he brought his wife Becca and daughter Bristolynn, and we all met up at the KCDC.  A new exhibit this time was a "mirror" that was actually a video screen that showed a video feed of the person in front of it but with various distorted filters.  The kids, especially Joshua, thought this was hilarious.

They had some soft blocks that you were supposed to put together to make an arch, but the kids were more interested in just walking on them.
Another exhibit is one with pipe segments and ping pong balls, and they pump air through the tubes, which lets you float the ping pong balls in mid-air.  Michael and I are both engineers, so we couldn't help but take our turn at it to try to design a more complex version that still worked.

Then we went outside.  There are a lot of different things to do out there, but the kids' favorite is always the bikes.  They have an assortment of vehicles to choose from, and you can ride them around a long track (well, it's really just a cement path that goes in a circuit).

Clara was struggling to get hers up the hill, so Michael hopped on to help give her a boost.  This led to a race to the finish line.

Then the girls decided they wanted to ride together on one of the bikes.  Clara drove and Hannah rode on the back, but Clara went too fast, which terrified Hannah, as you can see here.

That led Hannah to make these faces when I asked them to stop for a picture, including another good version of her Mckayla Maroney unimpressed face.

But then she realized she survived and that things would be okay, and she cheered up enough to smile for a couple cute pictures of the two sisters.

The next time around she wanted to take it a bit slower and asked me to pull her in the wagon, which I was happy to do.

We then went over to the music garden where they loved the combination of banging on things and making music.

After we were done at the Discovery Center, we decided to go to a nearby park.  In addition to the normal slides and things (which all the kids definitely took advantage of, they had this weird spider web-type thing that everyone loved.  All three of my kids are among the many children in that structure.  After that, we said good-bye to Michael and his family and headed home.  It was a really fun day.  I got to hang out with my friend and his family, and all of our kids got to play together.