Children's Museum Tucson — Attraction in Tucson

I have older kids and younger kids so have been coming here for many years. I'm glad to have a children's museum in town and there are some fun things to do here, like the car room and grocery shopping . But overall most of the exhibits (except the Arizona room which was redone a few years ago) are the same as they were 10 years ago and are showing their age. At this point they are tired and often run down. There are few varied sensory exhibits or things that keeps attention for long. Other children's museums seem to have much more variety such as bubble play, water play, sand, painting, etc. Hands-on experiments, touch and feel, and messy play which is what kids love. There are very few of those options here. It is mostly just plastic and pretend play toys. Even outside, why not water play options for one of the hottest cities in the country? It's fine but very basic, not creative or cool like I've seen at other places. Many exhibits are things that you can only look at. Like there are parking meters on one side of the wall but you cannot do anything with them. That's just one example but there are a lot of things just to look at and my kids were trying to play with them. Or random toy displays inside clear plastic boxes that you can't open. I had to explain no, you really can't do anything with them; just look at them. It's odd for a children's museum. The museum is not in an easily accessible part of town and you have to pay for parking. The amount of time that it takes us to drive there and get parked is about the amount of time that the kids are interested in it. I was excited to see a recent new location open up but it's not even included in the membership. It's beyond me why they would pick to invest in opening a new location that you can't even use with a membership. I would love to see smaller locations around town that members can use for some variety and also more accessible locations for people in different areas of town. One of my biggest pet peeves is that they changed the lobby to be basically a toy store. It is an overcrowded lobby trying to sell a bunch of kids toys. It is extremely annoying to parents like me because our kids are trying to buy toys instead of play. We could take them to Target to look at toys if we wanted that experience. The lobby previously had benches and places to sit and replacing it with a toy store was a very non-parent-friendly choice. There are some cool activities usually on the weekends but very few things during the day. There are a lot of young children there during the day but very few activities or engagement options. Overall, it's fine if you need an indoor place for the kids to play during very hot summers, but I do think there needs to be some major revamping and rethinking done to be up or par with other cities. The positive of it being in a difficult to access location and not anything great is that it is very empty during the week so it's easy to keep track...

Having been there several times with my kids over the years its always been a rather pleasant experience, but it seems like the place does very little to update everything and this last visit made it abundantly clear. I mean how hard is it to find firefighter/emt uniforms that are children's sizes at the very least? This last time we went, the place had a distinct smell of pee, and it seems like they have let off a bit on their sanitation practices considering everything is touched by the kids. A lot of the simple scientific interactive booths were not working when we got there. My kids love the grocery store section, but in all the years we have been there, there has not been any update to any of the items the kids play with. I could go to Wal-Mart and spend $100 on fake plastic/rubber food items and attach a magnet to them and it would improve the section considerably. My kids had to search and wait for available kid sized shopping carts because theres only a couple of them. Meanwhile, that area is packed because kids love pretending to shop and scan their items. At this point there's really no excuse to not create a fun, new or at the very least updated or improved base level experience when you take at least a year or so to return because you don't...

Yesterday was the School Readiness Night and my husband and I arrived 30 minutes early. My husband was in the Marine Corps for 8 years, so we are use to arriving 15 minutes prior to the 15 minutes prior. We live on Valencia, and were worried about getting stuck in 5 o'clock traffic. Well to our dismay we were told we would have to wait outside. Then what is the point of their "waiting" area? I have a 3 year old and a 4 year old. This is Arizona. It's hot! My children were turning red waiting in the shade, so we had to drive around in our car. If my oldest wasn't so excited about going to "school" we would have just left. We came back exactly at 530 to a long line. Now we were last in line and had to pay for more parking since we lost our meter. My oldest daughter was red, sweaty, and so disappointed. We had to stop waiting in line because my 3 year old was red and sweating as well. It was not worth waiting any longer in the heat while my daughters were extremely uncomfortable in the 108 degree weather. Poor management and poor planning. People who arrived early should have been allowed to check in and wait in the "Waiting" Area! So many small children and even a baby had to wait outside in the heat. Completely...