All about the kids

By Nicole Villalpando

Austin American-Statesman (TNS)

Patrick is too cute, and she knows it as she preens around a circle of chairs with people waiting to pet her.

She finds ways to go between their legs to get to the other side.

Her handler moves her back into the circle before he explains that Patrick was several years old before the National Aviary realized through DNA testing that the ill-named African penguin is a girl.

Her name already was known to the Pittsburgh community, having been in the newspaper and made public appearances.

Her name stuck, as well as the diva personality.

This is part of the penguin encounter at the National Aviary, one of four Pittsburgh museums my daughter, Ava, and I visited recently.

Pittsburgh in winter might seem like a drag, but this city is full of things to do with kids.

national aviary

The National Aviary is full of different birds in a variety of habitats.

Walk into the large wetlands exhibit and you’re hanging out with a flock of flamingos, some pelicans and spoonbills. You can feel the warmth and dampness of where they live as you hear them call to one another.

Walk into the grasslands and small birds are everywhere, from the trees to the ground. Finches and sparrows rule this territory.

The tropical rainforest is where the big birds roam. Throughout the day there were scheduled feedings and educational sessions at all three of these territories.

Penguin Point should have been one of the highlights of our visit, but sadly, it was too cold for Patrick and her friends to be outside. They were off exhibit, which was heartbreaking, but made us extra glad to pay the $40-a-person charge for the penguin encounter with Patrick. A pair of 2-month-old babies were on display in the window of the Aviary’s hospital as well.

carnegie museum

Pittsburgh has been blessed with money from steel tycoon and science enthusiast Andrew Carnegie.

His Carnegie Museum of Natural History brought 446 crates of dinosaur fossils to Pittsburgh from the Carnegie Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado. You can see many of these fossils today at the museum.

The first floor is full of dinosaurs, including all your favorites: T. Rex, triceratops, stegosaurus, diplodocus and pterodactyl.

You can see how they found the fossils and learn the difference between a fossil and a bone or shell.

Check out the paleontology lab, where you can watch scientists clean off their latest finds. Then you can pretend to find dinosaurs in a Bone Hunters Quarry.

Head to the second floor to learn about African and North American wildlife.

These areas are not for the kid who shies away from taxidermy. It’s all taxidermy all the time, and it’s graphic taxidermy.

The third floor takes you into a more human world of ancient Egyptians, American Indians and people living in the Arctic. You can climb through an igloo and watch an Inuit family.

science center

Carnegie also lends his name to the Carnegie Science Center.

Where the natural-history museum is about looking with your eyes, the science center is about touching, playing and doing.

Plan to spend a full day here, and even then you can’t do it all.

A two-story replica of the International Space Center has you rappelling outside the station to complete a series of tasks that astronauts have to do. You can build airplanes and parachutes to launch.

On the second floor, we were captivated by the miniature railroad display, which shows Pittsburgh in the 1880s to 1930s, complete with steel mills, a carnival, farms and trams up the mountain.

In Roboworld, we controlled Andy, the Robo-Thespian, who did a mean Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.

On the upper floors, you can learn about new technologies in surgery and try to do an endoscopic procedure.

You also can learn about how elements affect buildings as you try to build a structure that can withstand an earthquake.

The science center also has a planetarium and an IMAX theater, as well as a submarine you can board and go below the surface.

The museum also has a separate building called HighMark SportsWorks that is all about the science of sports.

children’s museum

We couldn’t leave Pittsburgh without hitting the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

The museum has some very cool exhibits such as the Attic, in which you can try to stand up in the gravity room; the Garage, which allows you to build magnetic cars, shoot parachutes off a high platform and see how wheels work; and an indoor water play area.

Throughout the museum, art installations are everywhere and are interactive. We loved the Text Rain, which rained letters that formed words that formed poetry above our shadows.

But what we loved the most was the MakeShop. Children played with circuits for an hour, and then tried to build a house with wood and nuts and bolts. Some also sat down and sewed a Little Red Riding Hood from scratch. These weren’t kits. These were real-world tools kids got to use with adult supervisors who encourage creativity while not being overprotective. Parents were encouraged to make, too.

There was so much to do at these Pittsburgh museums, the words “I’m bored” never left Ava’s mouth.