Rochester, NY

We went to the Strong Museum in Rochester, which is the 2nd largest children's museum in the country! They get a lot of winter there and need fun indoor places for kids. And our local children's museum membership got us in for free, which is pretty cool.

This place was AMAZING. It just kept going and going, and the kids had a blast. We could have spent a whole day in each section, but we had to move along.

The Sesame Street section was one of my favorites.

Okay, this was really fun. They had a green screen for the kids to stand in front of, facing this small monitor. They got to choose a character to talk to, and they were put into the picture with them.

Then they had several larger monitors for everyone else to watch. So clever.

I can't tell you how many dress-up places there were. And several performance stages. Every time I saw Brennan, he was wearing a different outfit.

There was something for everyone there, and they played hard for hours.

This was a crazy fun game. We had to fill the trays with food on the conveyor belt before it went behind the machine. Everyone was yelling and running back and forth with the food. It was quite a group effort.

There was so many different themed sections. Here's the Berenstein Bears room, and the characters were walking all over the museum.

We ended with the super hero room. My boys loved it, but Jill's girls were less interested, so they left to ride the carousel. My boys, on the other hand, couldn't care less about the rows and rows of vintage Barbies and dolls.

We took turns climbing the walls like Spiderman.

There was lots of cool architecture everywhere. One of Dave's favorite sections was the old video games. He even got to play Atari.

Afterwards we went out to dinner and said good-bye to our friends. We had so much fun staying with Sherry. She's so sweet with our boys, and they adored her cat Gus. She has a special place in our hearts, since she's the one who introduced me and Dave to each other almost 16 years ago. She also introduced me to Jill, who later became my roommate and other best friend at college.

Craig and Jill and their girls, Avery (3) and Madison (5). They drove up from Pennsylvania to hang out with us and see Sherry's new house. It was a great weekend. The next time we go there we want to make sure we go to Niagra Falls, which is just an hour and a half away from Rochester.