Today we visited The Works, a science and technology museum located in Newark, OH. We went down with my parents, my sister, brother-in-law and niece.

Cousins at The Works

This museum was chock-full of activities for little kids. From the minute they entered the building to the minute they left, the girls were playing, experimenting, and learning. We got to try playing a theremin and a xylophone bench. We built and tested marble tracks, built some circuits, learned about light, prisms, and lasers, tested our vertical leap, played in a kid-sized city with grocery store and doctor’s office, watched a glass-blowing demonstration, explored an interurban railway car, and learned about Licking County history. Catherine said her favorite parts were building circuits and the Invent Lab, where she got to build a robot from salvaged computer parts (this was probably one of my favorite parts, too).

Papa and Catherine Dissect a Keyboard

The museum is in downtown Newark, which is about 25 minutes from Columbus, and about 40 minutes from Mount Vernon, where my parents live. Admission for the four of us came to $20 – $7 for each adult and $3 for each child. I would definitely recommend a visit for anybody with kids who lives in the Central Ohio area, or anybody paying the area a visit.

To see all of the photos from our visit, visit the full gallery.

(The Wood family is currently in Ohio, staying with Peter’s parents, and visiting with them, Peter’s sister, brother-in-law, and niece, and doing the things that there are to do in Central Ohio. We join their activity already in progress…)

We’ve been here in Mount Vernon since December 29, and have been enjoying spending time with family. We celebrated my Mom’s birthday, did another Christmas celebration in Mount Vernon, visited a train, celebrated my niece’s birthday, celebrated New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Catherine admires some art

Puzzling Painting

Today, Catherine, Esme, Rebecca and I took off for a family trip down to the Columbus Museum of Art. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and apparently it’s recently been overhauled. We had a very enjoyable visit to the museum. Nearly every gallery had some kind of kid-friendly activity, whether a matching game with photos from the current gallery, or a puzzle of a painting in the gallery, assembled with the actual painting on the wall for reference.

The museum is a very manageable size, and yet maintains an impressive collection. It even has an area devoted exclusively to kids, the Wonder Room.

Wonder Room

We spent a little over two hours at the museum, and the girls enjoyed every part of it, except for the part where we had to leave! Since both girls are under 6, and AAA offers a BOGO discount, we only paid $10 for the four of us! I highly recommend a visit if you’re in the Columbus area.

Tomorrow we’ll be headed to Newark with my family to visit The Works, a science and technology museum with lots of hands-on activities for the kids. Looking forward to another day of exploring and expanding young minds, and having fun with family!

If you head over to our gallery, you can see the daily photo galleries from our trip so far. Far more photos than I’ve included in this blog post!

I’ve been very busy at work, recently. I needed to take some time off, and my birthday occurred more or less after most of my major projects were due to be finished. So I went ahead and scheduled off a week and a half, starting on my birthday (October 6… 32 years old!) without any real plan as to what I would do with it.

I’m currently on day three of my vacation, and the first three days have been spent with my little family of four. Today we just returned from a trip to stay at the InnSeason Resorts HarborWalk, in Falmouth, Massachusetts. This was an interesting trip, because Falmouth has never really been a destination for us in and of itself. We’ve been there many times, but only for the purposes of taking one of the ferries (the Island Queen or the Steamship) to visit Rebecca’s parents on Martha’s Vineyard. This time, we stayed *in* Falmouth and pretty much everything we did was in Falmouth. In fact, the resort we stayed at was located adjacent to the parking lot for the Island Queen, and we’ve walked past it on our way to the Island Queen many times, without a second thought that we’d ever actually stay there!

In any case, because of their timeshare membership, Rebecca’s parents were able to help us get rooms at the resort at a pretty steep discount. We ended up with two adjoining rooms, each of which had its own bathroom, kitchen, bed, pull-out couch, tv, and electric fireplace. There was more than enough room for the girls to run around, hang out, and play while Mama and Papa had some time together. We also did some swimming at the indoor pool of one of the other InnSeason resorts in Falmouth, which we had free access to.

In addition to the swimming and hanging out, we went to the Woods Hole Science Aquarium, run by the National Marine Fisheries Service. It was a fairly small aquarium, when compared to something like the New England Aquarium in Boston. But what was really cool about this one was that once you had walked through the main gallery of the aquarium, you could go up some stairs and walk around *behind* the tanks, seeing how everything worked behind the scenes. They had some extra exhibits, and you could see how the tanks were opened to take fish out, or put food in and were fitted with some high quality biorb heater to keep the fish water warm. Very cool. They also had some seals in a pool out in front of the aquarium, and we were there while they were feeding the seals. The girls loved watching the seals swim around, come up for food, and splash in the water.

Since we had our own kitchen(s) at the resort, we bought most of our food and prepared it at the resort. We did go out for a few meals, however. One of my favorites was lunch at Mary Ellen’s Portuguese Bakery in Falmouth. It was a tiny little place attached to the back of a Dairy Queen, with a counter and stools, and some small tables for seating. The four of us sat at stools up at the counter. I enjoyed a Portuguese omelette with linguica and Portuguese cheese, with grilled home fries and Portuguese bread toast, while Rebecca had the pork cacoila with rice. Catherine stuck to the grilled cheese sandwich and fries. The food was delicious – the flavors of the omelette were sublime.

Here are some of my favorite photos from our trip:

Birthday lunch at b.good in Hingham (we stopped there on the way down to use the coupon I got LAST YEAR on my birthday...)

The girls playing "roll the pumpkin" on (one of) the bed(s) at the resort

My girls!

You can see all of the photos from our trip in the Falmouth Trip gallery.

This little trip was just long enough to enjoy some time away from home with the family, while not too long to break the bank. It was a good start to my time off. I plan to spend the rest of my time off helping out around the house, getting some home projects done, hanging out with the girls so that Rebecca can do some of her own projects, and generally enjoying working for my family and not for someone else.

I’m also looking forward to my parents coming up to visit this coming weekend. They’ll only be here for a couple of days, but it will be good to see them and for them to get to visit with the girls.

Here’s what’s been going on with the Wood family recently!

If you haven’t been following Rebecca Rides, head over and check it out. Rebecca has been stepping up her training rides for the Pan-Mass Challenge. I’ve been pitching in, too, taking charge of the girls while Mama is out on her rides. Sometimes we go out and do fun things, like go to the playground down the street or to the lovely Lynch Park. I’m happy to be able to help, and excited to see Rebecca enjoying her rides and becoming more confident.

This past week was Bring Your Child To Work day. I brought both Catherine and Esme for a few hours on Thursday morning. I gave them a brief tour around the warehouse and then they hung out with some of our designers and drew on the whiteboard. I appreciate my co-workers for putting up with the girls for a little while. The girls definitely enjoyed it… Catherine had been talking about coming to work with me practically since last year. 🙂

Catherine with co-workers

In the photography department, I’m working on some new ideas for Peter R. Wood Photography, and hopefully you’ll be hearing about them soon. I also recently attended a photography seminar and learned a few things that will help me with the photography biz.

One of Esme’s favorite things recently is sitting in the little adirondack rocking chair in our living room, rocking and playing with a toy phone. She also likes to grab books and bring them over to us to read. She loves helping clean things up and put them away, almost as much as she loves taking them out. Catherine is loving reading, too, and is showing us her ability to read more and more every day. She’s even started writing (via dictation) and reading emails. So if you want to email her, please do! She’ll read it (with some help from Mama and Papa) and write back! You can contact her via our contact page, or via her email address which, if you know Rebecca’s or mine, is exactly what you’d expect.

Want more? I’m guessing most of our readers are friends on Facebook as well, but if not, you can friend me or Rebecca for lots more updates. I also post frequently on Twitter.