Hands-on House Children's Museum - Lancaster, PA

The last stop on our "Daddy's out of town, so we should be too" tour was the Hands-on House Children's Museum in Lancaster, a destination I chose in part because it was (sort of) on the way home and also because it participates with the ACM Reciprocal Program.  It was the one place on this trip where I had never been and I was excited to check out someplace new.

Museum hours are 10:00am to 5:00pm, though we got there fairly late (thanks to a late, late night with my friend Barb and too many glasses of wine the night before).  Admission is $8.50 each, regardless of age, so the Pittsburgh Children's Museum Membership saved me $25.50

This is exactly the kind of place that I wish we had in State College and I often wonder if this is what Centre Grounds has in mind as they continue to look for a permanent space for the under five crowd.  

In some ways it is like a scaled back version of the Please Touch Museum, but with some agricultural and manufacturing themes thrown in.  The kids got to pick corn, feed it to the pigs, deliver it to different end-users (such as grocery stores and restaurants), collect eggs, and milk cows.  In the manufacturing facility, they created what felt like hundreds of whatcha-ma-giggles using an assembly line, packaged it for shipping and did maintenance on parts. In reality, it was probably only dozens of them.

 There was a face painting station where Cathy did her own art work, while Matt asked me if I could make him  look like a lion, which he sort of did.  My art skills aren't quite what they used to be.

I am happy to report that it came off pretty easily... was so afraid that my little girl (who looked surprisingly like something out of the movie Avatar) would be blue for days!  I lucked out - she decided to wash her face even before we left the museum, though I did still have the little lion with me when we went out for dinner before the long drive home.

What would a children's museum be without a grocery store... so of course, Hands-on House had one! One of the things I liked here (and that would be a nice addition to Please Touch Museum) was that they had a number of 'shopping lists' the kids could use as they went through the store.  Surprisingly, Cathy was the only one who played in this room - Matt went back to making whatcha-ma-giggles - and she started off shopping quite nicely for each of the items on her list (they have both pictures and words for each item so even non-readers can follow the list) before heading off to the cash register instead.

Although we didn't play there, the museum had a room with trunks full of dress-up clothes, a tree house where kids could make foam birds to sail through the hallway, and a track to race cars that they put together themselves... It also had a very nice outside play area and the kids were able to go 'birdwatching' with binoculars and fake birds throughout the yard. 

Overall, I really liked this place and I could easily spend a few hours there again another day.  If nothing else, it's not terribly far out of the way on a drive home from Philadelphia and it's a nice way to break up an otherwise long drive for the kids!