A visit with Uncle Seb

Last month I got a membership for our family to the Natural Science Center of Greensboro. We have been several times already and are looking forward to taking advantage of going to some of the reciprocal museums through our museum passport program. The first trip I decided to take was to see my brother. He lives about a mile away from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh. I had no clue what to expect but I was shocked and amazed when we got there and I saw how big it was. We spent a good 5 hours there and probably only saw 1/3 of what the museum had to offer...and it is free to the public! We had so much fun. The kids spent most of their time in a hands-on, interactive discovery room for younger children. We probably could have spent the whole day just in that room. They had about 12 animal costumes with masks for them to try on (which they loved of course)...and they became these animals and were creeping and crawling all over the room, which was really funny to watch. Then they had these "discovery drawers" and each drawer has a theme...for exm. one drawer is about animal coverings and it had several different animal furs and they had to try and figure out which animal belonged to which fur- others had animal bones, feathers, animal tracks, etc. and they had about 25 or more different drawers. One of my favorite things that we saw was this huge bee colony under a big, clear glass wall and we could watch the bees busy at work and observe all the different stages of the growth and development of the bee from larvae to adulthood. It was fascinating. Then we went to a show called "meet the animals" and we got to meet and touch 4 animals from Africa: a hedgehog, snake, lizard, and a disgusting hissing cockroach. We loved it so much that I am going to try and go there at least once a month. We will have to go several more times just to see the whole thing! It's always good spending time with my brother. I enjoy his company immensely and the kids love him so much and think the world of him. He is such a good uncle and I am glad he was able to slip away from the Ph.D world of academia and spend some time exploring the museum with us.