she blinded me with science

on our last full day in dallas, MIL suggested a visit to a new-ish museum in town that she thought sounded like fun:  the perot museum of nature and science.  yup, as in ross perot, former presidential candidate wannabe.  dude has a stinking fortune, so it was nice of him to use some of it for something like this.  it's really cool-looking, too:

the bean loves dinosaurs, so it was pretty exciting to her.

as for me, i'm pretty easily amused.  i liked these bubbles that were suspended from the ceiling and randomly bobbed up and down.

we'd managed to time our entry fairly well, because the next showing of a 3D movie was just about to begin.  after scanning our tickets, we were ushered through a hallway and into the theater, where we spent the next half hour or so totally mesmerized by a family of meerkats.  i never realized how adorable those things are, and really hadn't known much about them aside from timon, the disney-fied version in "the lion king."

benches with cool little factoids were sprinkled throughout the multi-level building.

there were so many levels with a ton of interesting exhibits.  i was kind of overwhelmed by it all, but the bean loved it.  and it was fun to watch her scurry from one thing to the next.

lightning mcqueen!

i think we spent the bulk of our visit staring at the various dinosaur fossils.

those museum people know how to catch kids' attention.  because really, what kid doesn't love to giggle about pee and poop?

the gems and minerals hall.  heh.

oh please.  like you didn't totally snicker.

by the time we were just kind of done with the whole science and nature thing, we'd explored a good chunk of the museum - although it turned out that we'd missed an entire bottom floor that was geared towards younger visitors.  crap.  oh well, next time.

and on our way back to the car, the bean stopped to play some of the instruments outside.

headed to the dallas area?  check out this joint.  it was really fun!