MAKENight at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

Our fair city is all about the 21+ Nights at locations that are generally family-oriented. We’ve attended one at the Science Center, one at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, one at the Carnegie Library, and now we have one more 21+ Night to add to the list:

MAKENight at the Children’s Museum.

Have you ever wanted to run around the Children’s Museum and touch all the things without, you know, having to push little children out of the way? This night is for you! We went just before Valentine’s Day, when the theme was My Snarky Valentine, and we played with ALL the things and made crafts and ate donuts and drank chardonnay, just like our inner 7-year-olds wanted.

This is a cool light exhibit where the lights hanging overhead begin to swing back and forth as you walk under them. Very physics.

This is a giant wheel that you can put a rubber ball on, and then the ball will go through a series of pathways to eventually bounce out into one of several buckets. I think this is also very physics.

THEN there is a room where you can stand in front of a high-powered flashing light that will capture your shadow on the wall!

And I have no clue what this is, but it’s another opportunity for you to dance around and have your image projected onto a wall. What fresh and fly moves we have!!

Admission for the event includes all the free munch-upons you can get (until they run out). There were roughly 6 giant donut stacks from the Priory, and basically, they were so delicious that it made me reevaluate our entire wedding and wonder if we should have held the reception at a place that could have put donuts on our cookie table.

After we stood in a long line to get glasses of wine, it was time to play Valentine Bingo with Yelp! Husband beat me somehow, and I have to think he was cheating. He got a pack of Yelp gum, and I got a sticker as runner-up.

We also stopped by the Tunnel of Love, which was held in front of that series of actual tunnels that terrified me as a child, and it appears that the Tunnel of Love is rather dangerous.

Next up, I’d had a glass of wine and was ready to be crafty, so I made my lovely husband this AMAZING Labyrinth-themed Valentine that says, “I move the stars for no one… except YOU, Valentine.”

David Bowie always has my back on Valentine’s Day.

In addition to the fact that I was allowed to drink wine and eat an unlimited supply of donuts while making crafts, we could put up real Missed Connections!! (If you’re unfamiliar, Missed Connections are a section of Craigslist where you can post about a person you saw/talked to/flirted with but never got contact info for, and hopefully they will see it, and you will go on a date and fall madly in love. I posted a Missed Connection about Michael when we first met at the coffeeshop in 2006, the text of which is written on the stickynote above his head, and as you know, the rest is history.)

Michael was not interested in making paper crafts, but he was TOTALLY feeling making some love spells.

He even included our favorite herb, rosemary.

I managed to find another ‘make your own Valentine’ station, and I used this set of arts and crafts to make a lovely inappropriate valentine with Cure lyrics.

I am 90% sure this is how Robert Smith imagined his lyrics would someday be used when he wrote the song 30 years ago.

We had a wonderful time at the MAKENight event. There were honestly more things we wanted to do than we had time for in the 3 hours the event ran. The only regret we have was that we didn’t double-date, because there were a number of photo ops (like scenes from Titanic and Ghost, for example) that would have required a third party to take the photo. Thankfully, we ran into another group by the Kiss Cam and took each other’s photos, so that worked out nicely.

The next MAKENight 21+ Night is on May 12, and these events always sell out. So mark it on your calendar and get your tickets as soon as you can!