San Jose Discovery Museum

Hello blog readers! This is a guest post by Holly's Dad. A few months ago we took Holly down to the San Jose Discovery Museum. It must have been October because there was a pumpkin festival going on outside. It was a bit of a drive and we had no idea what to expect. Would it be worth the long drive? Is there really lots of parking in San Jose? Would Holly like it? Did the museum serve life-sustaining coffee-based beverages? Did we really need to bring TWO bathing suits to a museum? (Spoiler: Yes, No, Yes, No, Yep ).

Well, as soon as we got in the front door, Holly took off. There was a fire truck that she could climb in, climb all the way to the top, even drive the steering wheel. She could have stayed here all day but we pointed out there was even more museum beyond.


This is right next to the fire truck. They had some kind of sciencey leaf-blower in a box set up to demonstrate the Bernoulli effect and the little plastic balls would hover in mid-air. Holly loved it, alternating between carefully hovering the balls in the flow of air with sticking her face in the blower.



The next room was even better. Holly immediately identified this as a Princess Carriage. This became her "home base" for the museum.

It must be a Princess Carriage. What else could it be, with all the pumpkins outside?


I think October is national face-painting month.


I couldn't figure out this gear table, either. There were gears, and they turn and stuff and ... ooh what's over there?!




A boat! And a stowaway.


This one made even less sense than the gear table.

Dinosaurs! Or mammoths at least. Whatever, doesn't matter the specifics, any kind of big animal is a great excuse to run around yelling ROOOAAAAR.

On a scale of one to ten, this exhibit was .... well, at least it was better than the gears.

Get it? Scale. 'Cause it's a scale. (I don't know if I'll ever be invited back to this blog).

This was almost better than the fire truck. Except despite the promising looking cabinets and cubbies there wasn't much to get into in the back. And believe me, she tried every handle, knob and door.

Next room! Moar science!

Gravity! This was a great idea for an exhibit until they realize it's super fun to throw the tennis balls in the opposite direction! Look at Daddy chase the tennis ball into the cafeteria, so fun! Here's another tennis ball, daddy!

Wall of a thousand germs.


Step into Art. Paintings and storybooks come alive.




The entire arts and crafts activities pictured here probably spanned about 45 seconds. Run, run, paint, run, draw, paint, run.

Awww. The Mona Lisa frames anyone elegantly, so timeless.


Yearrggh! I take it back! What's that??




This was really cute. It was a nice little moment of calm within the chaos. There was a little campsite set up and we had great fun having a little tea party and campout.


I didn't understand the book about a giant chicken who transports marshmallows, but it was a hit with the kids.



Building stuff.




More vehicles to explore! This room was set up like a farmer's market.




We made pretend pizzas. There was also a little station set up where you could make dolls out of a corn husk. Holly wasn't too interested but Mommy was determined to finish one. I guess I was slacking on the picture taking. Maybe that's a good thing, considering how the corn husk doll came out.

Gravity worked throughout the entire museum!





This room had a bunch of interesting stuff, but the dragon was easily her favorite.




The infinite mirror kind of freaked her out. I think me and Mommy were more amused by it than she was.

This was a workshop where you could make painting by putting colored sand and glitter on sticky paper with stencils. It took some careful supervision on Mommy's part but it worked a lot better than I expected it to.


This one was super fun. The water would evaporate after a minute or two and it made a continually evolving canvas. It was one of those nice moments that remind you that while iPads are great and all that, sometimes all you need is a big rock and a paintbrush.

Making great progress on learning to write her name. She narrates the process, "down", "down", "across".



We're back downstairs now. This contraption was set up so you'd rock the platform back and forth and that would turn a flywheel which would eventually light a string of christmas lights. This is sort of like those trendy gyms where you have to generate your own electricity with the elliptical or the lights all go out. Holly thought it was hilarious to run around on the platform. She'd make a great personal trainer, she wouldn't let me stop the contraption until I had burned a couple hundred calories.


Lunch. At this point in the day I'm exhausted. But Holly's just getting warmed up. We've carefully avoided the water room. We'll take a quick look at the pumpkin festival outside and then go back to that.


Somehow she's got tons of energy left for this. She's just getting started.


Turned out that the pumpkin-related activities weren't all that interesting. Also, by the time we got there, a lot of the booths were winding down. But there was this strange spaceship thing, someone had built a UFO just for the heck of it and was now touring it around to carnivals and fairs like this. I didn't go inside, so these pictures are fascinating. Until now I could only imagine what went on inside. It was also a pretty monumental milestone in the "waiting in line for something" category, I think she waited for 8-10 minutes to get to explore that thing.


Alien technology.

This was the Bubble room. Quite separate from the water room. There were only a few stations set up here, and it had all the charm of a commercial kitchen built in a basement. But there was always a crowd down here, and the Bubble stations were super fun.



In the process of bubble-making, your hands and arms got inevitably soapy, which was great because then you could stretch and pok the bubbles without popping them.




This next device was the most amazing one here. You make a sheet of bubble film, and blow out a bubble from that. It was like that scene in the Abyss with the water-monster.

Look at that bubble! Nice job Holly!

And now... we're onto the main event. The water room. We had been carefully guiding Holly away from here all day, knowing that once she discovered it she'd never leave. We didn't realize the half of it!


Preview of the awesome water tornado.




This was probably Holly's favorite thing in the whole museum. It was a mini water tornado, just the right height for little kids. The balls would swirl around and go down the whirlpool, popping out the bottom where eager little hands would grab them and drop them in again.

At one point, there was a whole crew of kids determined to fill the thing up or somehow overwhelm it with balls. They were going as fast as they could, and scavenging balls from the floor and even swiping them from other exhibits. But the vortex could not be stopped.


It was like a little toddler Charybdis.




Hands, arms, and even heads were offered to the whirlpool. Towards the end, they even went so far as to try and dismantle the other exhibits to dump into the vortex. That plastic yellow and red funnel thing in the background above ended up in the whirlpool at one point. I don't doubt that eventually the entire museum would have been submerged in there had we parents not reluctantly intervened.

This picture was perfectly timed. It took so many tries to get it right. Just kidding, the balls would just hover there like a wetter version of the leaf-blower Bernoulli thing near the entrance. It was pretty cool.


All of this. Must go into the whirlpool.


For the whirlpool. They even found a little stuffed animal from somewhere and tossed it in like some kind of ritual sacrifice.


This was pretty cool. It was a smoke bubble, you could adjust the shape of it by turning a dial and if you turned it too quick it would burst.


The little smock thing is really pointless here. She's already soaked. So glad we brought the bathing suit. But she wanted to wear it.





This was a pretty amazing bit of hydro-engineering. The jets of water would shoot the balls up into a little catch bin near the ceiling, and they would roll back down to where they started. It got stuck a lot but it was cool when it was going.


There was a ginormous version of the whirlpool. Fortunately it was well above troublemaker height range. Here I'm holding her up over my head to throw things in.


Smoke Bubble again. I hear it's going to make a cameo appearance in "Lost: the Movie".


If this was at floor level I'm pretty sure she would have dove in without hesitation.


This was a pretty clever little mechanism, it was a pneumatic tube like they used to have at banks or offices in dystopian movies. You could put the balls in there and they would whoosh up the tube and fly across the room and if you were lucky, they would land in the big whirlpool. Otherwise they would hit some unsuspecting parent, which could also be amusing.




More cool contraptions. At this point I think the museum was closing but good luck getting Holly to leave.

In this contraption, that big tube on the left filled up with water. You rolled a bunch of the balls down some ramps to the center, and then you pulled a lever to release the valve and the water would jet up sending the balls flying and of course spraying water everywhere.


It made a really satisfying whoosh sound.

One last pull!

And after the flood, we paddled back to our car and headed home.

It was a pretty amazing place, there was a ton of stuff to do and Holly was interested in everything, but the water room was definitely the highlight for her. That alone was worth the drive down there.