Natural History Museum

I'm not a big fan of history or museums ...yawn. But, my husband loves them and wanted to check out the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. It was the 1st Tuesday of the month, so we all got in free. I haven't been here in quite a while so I had an ounce of enthusiasm for things I may not have remembered seeing before. We also avoided the $8 parking fee by parking by the swim building. It was about a block further down; but it was free!

The 1st area we went to see were the minerals, gems, rocks. There were so many pretty gems to look at. The girls were also very interested in looking at them and had fun telling what each gem looked like. They would say, "Mommy, this looks like snow, like icicles, like ice cream with chocolate chips on it". They also loved looking at the jewels and the big diamonds. They are going to be typical girls when they grow up who love jewelery. Just the opposite of their mom. The only bling I wear is my wedding ring and a Tinkerbell watch I took from my daughter cuz I need one and she didn't wear it.

The 2nd areas we went to were the animal dioramas. Rather than looking at these dioramas, I could have seen most of these animals alive at the zoo. My 3 year old was wondering why the animals didn't move as she zoomed past all the dioramas. She did have fun guessing what all the different animals there were. She did give a lot of deer answers which I would have too for the caribou, elk, black tailed deer, white tailed deer, mule deer, etc, etc. I think we had seen quite enough of the deer species.

We then went into a bird exhibit; which I guess is a little interesting if you like birds. There were some exhibits with buttons that did things and the girls loved pushing all the buttons. It quickly became annoying when you hear all kinds of bird noises at once for a period of time from them button pushing. So, quickly moving on to...

The Dinosaur area. This is what hubby was most excited about. It turned out they had the main dino area closed for a bigger area to open later this summer. We did see them working on a couple huge fossils in the dino lab.

The Insect Zoo was interesting to see and the girls enjoyed looking at various specimens under the microscope in the Discovery Center.

Overall, I'm glad I didn't pay to come here. Heck, I wouldn't even come back for another free Tuesday visit for another long time.