Gateway Childrens Museum

Last weekend we spent a day playing at the Children's Museum down at the Gateway Center in Salt Lake. If you have little kids (or big kids for that matter) and you are visiting SLC you definitely need to check this place out.

IT'S HUGE!!

When you walk in the front the first thing that you see is a 2 story metal bee hive. Inside you can use tubes to move plastic balls around, kind of like the vacuum tubes at the bank. There are tubes going everywhere and it was fun to watch where they would end up.

Will wasn't very excited about it because we wouldn't let him crawl into the balls like he does at Grandma's house.

In the room behind the bee hive they have an entire little town set up for the kids to play in. Everything is child sized. Will liked playing with the tools in the construction zone. They have huge stuffed blocks that you can use to build with and a crane that you can crank the blocks up to kids on the upper level with.

Will decided that he would like to try playing at being a police officer for a bit. He found a police car and drove around for a while.

Running down the center of the little town they have a water zone where the kids can play at diverting the flow of the water and sending things like wind-up toys and ping pong balls down pipes. They had a lower area that was just the right height for Will.

Once he was done playing in the water he decided to try his hand at mowing the "lawn". Mostly he just ran into us and other kids!

We spent some time in the area designated for kids under 3. It was quieter and they had blocks and fun toys to play with.

In the little kids area there was a little house for the small kids, but it wasn't nearly as decked out as the one for the bigger kids next to it.

The little kids area is called the pond. They had a padded area that looked like water and a beaver dam that you could crawl into. Here's Will pretending to be a beaver.

Here he is riding on a fish in the pond.

Toward the back of the room they had a little farm set up where the kids could plant and pick veggies, gather eggs from stuffed chickens, and "ride" a horse.

Will liked driving the farmers truck the best. We had to practically drag him away from it so that other kids could have a chance.

We spent about 2 hours playing at the Gateway on Saturday, and we managed to only explore the lower level! Paul and I checked this place out when it opened a few years ago (yes, I am well aware that we are weird for going to a children's museum when we didn't have a child) and there is a ton of stuff upstairs, too. We bought a year membership so that we can go back whenever we feel like it.

If anyone is going to be in town and wants to go let me know. Will would love to have a chance to drag some new adults around for a while. :-)