Forced Family Fun

Sickness, work, more sickness, sports practices, grocery shopping, games, volunteer work, and more sickness has kept our family from spending quality time as just the five of us.  No longer content to let another weekend slip by without our little family doing something together.

Linus was not sure to make of this.  He kept suggesting things that fell along our usual lines of divide and conquer.  They weren't bad ideas, but they defeated the purpose of togetherness.  I decided that we should all go to the Living Computer Museum.  This museum had been previously recommended to me, and as luck would have it, there was a 2 for 1 coupon in the Entertainment book I bought from my niece.

The promise of Minecraft got the kids out the door....

This place is pretty cool.  The main floor has robotics and virtual reality.

Eileen loved controlling the robot.  Linus later chased me around the main floor with it. It was a little reminiscent of the part of the movie, AI, where there are all the outdated robots.

There were also robot cubes that you could assemble and play with.  Robin liked those.  Dave tried out the virtual reality.  Linus was disappointed to learn you had to be thirteen or older.

Luckily, Linus was old enough to do the self-driving car simulation.  Eileen hopped along for the ride.  I could not watch due to motion sickness.

The main floor has a digital art studio.  The kids all enjoyed that room.  When we first walked in, on one of the Apple IIg computers, someone had drawn a Pepe the Frog.  I was not happy about this at all.  It took me a few minutes to remember how to use the program and then I was able to successfully erase it.  Linus then created his own work of art.

We spent some time on the mezzanine level --aka where the kids could play Minecraft.  I personally played around with Super Mario maker.  Personally, I think upstairs was the best....

Right when you walk in, there is an enigma machine. So cool.

There is every kind of old computer imaginable.  Even cooler, they all have games -- the big floppy disks of the 80s, the square floppy disks of the 90s.  There was even a Commodore64!  It took me a while, but I found the Apple IIe computer with Oregon Trail.  I loved how they even had a pretend 1980s living room with an old Atari set up with at least 20 games to choose from.

Seriously, if you miss playing video or computer games from any era, this place has them.  If I didn't feel the need to supervise my kids, I probably could have spent way too much time there.  We didn't get the chance to check out the room with the giant mainframe computers.

We didn't get the chance because kids.  What is forced family fun without a trip to the urgent care?  Eileen had been complaining about her eye.  It had looked irritated, but she said she had poked herself with a stick.  While at the museum, her eye really began to swell and had crusties. 

We cut our visit short and headed home.  Dave took Eileen to urgent care.  Diagnosis: stye.  I'm just glad it isn't pink eye.  Thank God for the Everett Walk-In clinic.  I feel like we are there every weekend at this point.  Even if we didn't get to see everything, I think everyone had fun during our forced togetherness.