After our outing at the Crown Center and before our trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden our grand tour of kid-friendly attractions across the lower Midwest included a stop at the Saint Louis Children’s Museum, also called The Magic House.

We had driven from Kansas City that morning and after five hours in the car, the boys were eager to get out and move. This enormous children’s museum fit the bill nicely, offering lots of room and numerous exhibits. Highlights of the museum include:

A giant beanstalk that spans three stories and allows much climbing.

A fairy tale area where our little princeling dressed up and rode in a splendid coach.

A recreation of the Oval Office where President Tommy got to make some phone calls (he also did a great job with all of the trivia in this exhibit, correctly identifying Martin Van Buren as the first president to be born in the United States).

An interactive piece of performance art where children can dance and see the silhouette of their bodies displayed in a variety of shimmering colors and patterns.

We also enjoyed the construction zone, the bubble-making area, and the Lewis and Clark Adventure where children older than five can take a ten-minute walk along the path followed by those famous explorers (portions of the trail are in a tunnel, so it’s not for the claustrophobic). And not to be overlooked is a three-story slide that the kids felt was worth repeated climbs up the stairs (again, not such a great option for those of us who don’t like confined spaces).

And we didn’t even make it to all of the exhibits, missing out on the Children’s Village, Air Power, Waterworks, Can You Solve the Mystery, and Super Service Center. In fact, after an entire afternoon in the museum, I couldn’t even tell you where these exhibits are located. It’s just that big.

Which may be why I left The Magic House feeling like I had hit sensory overload. I wouldn’t call the place unreasonably crowded, but something about the exhibits seemed to invite wild behavior, grabbing, and shoving in a way that I haven’t seen before. I don’t know if it’s the sheer size or if it’s that there is very little parental direction for most of the activities. The Star Spangled Center had the most instruction and it was easily the calmest and most fun part of the museum for me – although I’m guessing that many children, to say nothing of their parents, might find this the least engaging exhibit (I do recognize that not everyone gets jazzed at looking at Harry Truman’s sign or successfully completing quizzes about the judicial branch).

We may have just drawn the short straw the day that we were there. We encountered lots of older and bigger children who didn’t know how to share. And we got stuck in many of the rooms with a father and mother who had alcohol noticeably reeking from their pores and a tendency to lean in a little close to others around them. But I get the sense that perhaps the Magic House is best visited at times when there aren’t very many other people there. I’ve been to other children’s museums (in Madison, Austin, and Philadelphia) at peak hours and never felt quite as pressured or stressed out as I did at the Magic House.

Of course, the kids really liked it, so perhaps I should leave the judgment up to them. They would definitely go back.

A few tips…

The museum is located in Kirkwood, due west of downtown Saint Louis. It’s easy enough to get to, although until December 2009, Interstate 64 is closed between downtown and Kirkwood, so if that’s how you’ve been given directions, you’ll want to seek alternate routes.

The museum has a café with a cute menu, although we didn’t eat there. A few blocks away near the Kirkwood train station there is both a sno-cone shack and a frozen custard stand, should you feel like your nerves need a frozen treat when you are done. They can both be found close to the Kirkwood Farmer’s Market, which is open every day.

Bring water bottles with you. The museum is big and water fountains are few and far between. We were there on a hot day and some parts of the museum get quite warm.

I’ve written about how I like to seek out botanical gardens when we travel because the kids always enjoy them. When we were in Saint Louis, we spent about half a day at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and as usual the children loved it. We had planned a morning there and ended up staying for lunch and beyond because there was so much to see and do.

The garden was founded in 1859 and is the oldest continuously-operating botanical garden in the United States. It covers 79 acres so we didn’t see all of it, but highlights for us included:

A working cuckoo clock;

A labyrinth that the children could run through on their own while we watched them from a lovely tower;

The Western hemisphere’s largest Japanese garden where there are ponds and streams and peaceful gravel gardens, to say nothing of koi to feed;

The children’s garden, which is really more of a wonderful playground with ladders and walls to climb, rope bridges to cross, a cave to explore, slides to go down, and (crucial on a hot day) water to play in;

The Climatron, a geodesic dome that is full of tropical plants and animals and which also houses an exhibit about sustainability that had lots of interactive exhibits; and

Some Dale Chiluly sculptures, which I enjoyed just as much as at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

A few tips…

The garden’s website recommends allotting three hours for your visit. With kids, you could easily spend the better part of a day, especially if yours like to walk a lot. We had planned to drive over and see the Saint Louis Arch afterward (not to go up in, but just to see and take some pictures) but we ended up spending so much time at the garden that the kids didn’t want to go anywhere else.

We had a tasty and reasonably-priced lunch at Sassafras, the garden’s main restaurant, which happens to also be certified as the first “green” restaurant in the state of Missouri by the Green Restaurant Association. There are healthy options on the menu, and the portions are generous.

The summer house of the founder Henry Shaw is on the grounds and is open for tours – don’t skip it, even if you’re there with little ones. It’s worth seeing and there’s an excellent exhibit on how the work of slaves made the garden possible is in the basement; for Tommy it tied in well with our earlier visit to the Milton House. Ask the docent at the door for a scavenger hunt sheet and spend a little time looking for the items on it in the lovely herb garden that surrounds the house.