My husband and I snagged another date day this past weekend! It was a much needed time after a week with very little sleep and very tense news all around. When we secured our date time my only request was that we do something that would not involve us sitting down the whole time- many of our dates have been sitting at a table or sitting in a theatre and I love those, but I wanted something a tad more active. We have plans for more of these active types of dates once the weather cools off, but we were a bit stumped when it came to what to do mid August that fit this bill. We honestly considered just walking around an indoor mall for a few hours.

This visit was actually a birthday gift for my husband from FOUR YEARS AGO (thank you card that I found while accomplishing last month’s goal of cleaning the office!) but we kept putting it off until we could really get the most out of an admission. We wanted to wait until we could spend a WHOLE DAY there. But now that we have two kids, we’ve realized that those times will probably not just pop up anymore… so let’s just go for it before we put it off for another four years. The museum was huge and, as I mentioned, we only had just over an hour there so we have a LOT to cover when we go back sometime. Here’s just a small sampling of what we did get to see though:

This was in a room with a whole lot of automated instruments like player pianos and music boxes!

The European collection was VAST and full of amazingly diverse instruments

So much art on the actual instruments themselves! And then video of the instruments making art. LOVED it.

Plus, it did us so good to spend the time in a place that celebrated diversity and the arts! The art work and different sounds and celebrations on display in the museum are stunning and beautiful. The only downside was that you have to wear headphones almost the whole time when you are in an individual exhibit if you want to hear what the instruments sound like, so that made it a bit hard for us to talk about what we were hearing/seeing in the moment. We didn’t mind though, it just gave us more to talk about in between exhibits and on the way home.

There was also a whole section dedicated to you being able to try out instruments! We had a ton of fun there and it made us want to bring our son back who is absolutely in love with music, and with rhythmic instruments in particular!

SO: if you live in the Phoenix area, I highly recommend a visit to the Musical Instrument Museum. and no matter where you live, if you’ve been putting off something awesome until the perfect time- whether it be as a date or a solo venture- I highly recommend just embracing the now and doing it if you can 🙂