Michael's New Favourite Place

I took Michael to the Children's Museum today because I knew that it would be raining all afternoon. They built it after Robert and I had left, on the fifth floor of Taipei's largest bookstore (unfortunately also built after we left), so I had never been there before. We found it fairly easily and there weren't many other children there. I was especially glad about the lack of school groups. Our receipt says that we entered at 1:53pm and the cashier told us that we could go in and out as often as we wished until it closed at 9:30pm that evening. Well, I had no intention of staying there anywhere near that long. In fact, after thirty minutes, I wondered if we would even stay an hour and a half. Michael seemed to wander around, trying everything out for a minute or two and then move on. I couldn't get him involved in anything. After an hour or so, we went out for afternoon tea. They had a pretty good food court in the basement.

As soon as we got back, Michael really started to focus and concentrate. I guess he needed that first hour just to get oriented and discover all the options before settling down. In the end, I had to drag him away at 8pm. We did have a thirty minute break for dinner, and one other potty break, but the rest of the time, he played happily. I had originally thought that the 500NT price tag for both of us was a little steep, but for almost six hours of keeping Michael engaged, it was a deal.

The whole place is just like a massive preschool classroom, except they have way cooler equipment (Annie's adjectives are starting to rub off on me). There are 15 different centers for the kids to explore. Below are some of Michael's favourites.

Here he is in the Cotton Kid's Fashion Shop where he's basically sticking bits of different types of cloth and yarn onto the outline of a paper doll. His favourite part was cutting the yarn.


This is Michael in the Kid's Stage area. They had a tonne of dress up clothes in a massive walk in closet, but Michael wasn't too interested in dressing up.


However, he was interested in putting on little "shows." His favourite part was opening and closing the curtains.


In the construction area, I liked how they had the great view of 101 out the window. Of course, Michael liked it, too. It was great inspiration for the little builders!


In the raceway area they had all these open tubes with light rubber balls. The tubes are magnetically stuck to the wall, so Michael could move them around to create his own different raceways. Michael had a lot of fun moving all the pieces around and dropping balls in at the top. It was nice that they even provided stools, so that he could start higher.


The TV studio was cute, but it didn't hold Michael's interest for long.


So, I asked him to sing a song. Here he is doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider on TV.


Here's my little Mikey the Builder. He was pretty sad that there were other kids on this when we first arrived, but he soon got his turn.


He was really happy about getting to put on the vest, goggles and helmet as well.


But this was Michael's favourite activity of all. They had a mini supermarket set up with a real scanner and cash register. They even had their own play money. Michael would take turns with me being the shopper and the cashier. He loved scanning in the items and popping open the cash register.


He took it very seriously.


Especially since money was involved.


When he was the shopper, after he finished paying, he would run over to the next center which contained an Austin Mini, climbed in, put his shopping basket in the back seat, and drove home.


Brrooom, brrooom...


Sometimes the car broke down and he'd have to use a motorbike, or a motorscooter as he calls them.


Notice the basket of food carefully placed behind him.


There were other places as well, but those were Michael's favourites. He spent hours playing in that supermarket and in that Mini with me.

We were both really glad that we went. It wasn't even raining anymore by the time we left.