Crayola Factory & National Canal Museum

What do you do when your toddler flushes a four-ounce bottle of his sister's juice down the powder room toilet, flooding the bathroom? You mop up and decamp for greener pastures. Actually we were on our way to going to Easton to the Crayola Factory when Micah found a four-pack of Thea's juice somewhere on its way upstairs and decided to see if the four bottles and his bottle of formula would sink, swim or flush. Thea pulled two out of the toilet, I found one in the foyer, and the fourth is likely lodged somewhere beyond reach. The plumber will be coming on Monday, and his fee will be deducted from a future allowance payment.

Anyway, Crayola is just a bit more than an hours' drive from Princeton, and the route goes right past the drive-thru D-n-D, so coffee was also part of the agenda. Thea warmed up to Crayola pretty quickly - there are just so many little projects to try out: we got modeling clay, made gingerbread puppets, paper-bag puppets, went to this area that projected her movements onto a screen in various colors and speeds. She tried out her Super Spy dance moves and was impressed with the results. Micah liked the area that had lots of plastic balls that you dropped into a bin, the balls rode up on a screw-like device, went on rails over to a series of plastic ramps down into the bin where they could be retrieved and the process repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

An elevator ride above Crayola is the National Canal Museum, which was very cool - very hands on: Thea could take a model of a canal boat and move it through a series of locks up and down, loading coal along the way, until the boat arrived at the other end. She took it very seriously, unlike the three boys on a school field trip who were playing Battleship with their canal boats.

They could also build their own canal using a series of plastic walls and sending bathtub boats through the chutes that they created. Thea got to steer the tiller of a mock-up of a canal boat, which made a platform move and she tried pulleys to lift a 32 pound barrel to see which pulley system made it easier to lift. I almost enjoyed all of this more than Crayola, especially since there were fewer people around.

After we made the obligatory stop at the Crayola Factory Store, we had lunch at Perkins and then drove home. Micah was asleep before we got to the bridge over the Delaware River, and Thea conked out after a few rounds of games on her Leapster.