March 27th, 2011

We read all your blogs about the areas that you live in. My mom and I live in Wisconsin. We actually live in a little town near the city of Appleton.  We thought we would share pictures  of our nearest city like you all share pictures. Yesterday, Mom and Caleb went to downtown Appleton to see a children’s museum called the Building for Kids.

This is the corner that the museum was on. Mom was with some other people, so she didn’t want to cross the road to take a picture of the building itself.

Downtown Appleton is sort of recovering. There are some businesses, but there are also a lot of empty buildings. That large building is mostly empty.

The Building for Kids is supposed to be an educational children’s museum. It is mostly a gigantic play area, scattered with a few learning things. Mom thinks that if your visit was more structured, a kid might learn more! The two little girls we were with enjoyed themselves a lot, so that is the most important part!

Mom had seen commercials on television for their Japanese exhibit. It turned out mostly to be a room with a few manga-inspired things. It was still kind of cool—Mom was impressed that she recognized these characters! They’re from a movie called My Neighbor Totoro!

This is the cat bus! We’re not so sure what it is from, but it’s very funny looking. (Reading the Wikipedia article on My Neighbor Totoro explained that it comes from that movie too!)

My mom really enjoys zoos and animals. She was glad to see that they had some birds. They were all little finches and canaries.

They also had a few pet rats. They were female dumbo rats. This one was named Oreo. Some little child had put finger-paint all over the glass of the cage they were in, so there wasn’t too many places to get pictures.

Then they had a rainbow bearded lizard. He or she was pretty interested in sunning herself on the rock. I think that would be a pretty sweet life if I were a lizard!

Next time, I’ll show you some pictures of what else was inside the Building for Kids.