We went with Sophie to play at the WOW Museum in Lafayette – a children’s museum with all sorts of educational games and activities. There’s a bank with a working pneumatic tube. There’s a platform you can stand on and pull an enormous soap bubble around your entire body.

There’s a music room and an art room, a pirate ship and a sandbox, a table full of magnets, an enormous doll house, a grocery store with a checkout lane, a railroad station, and at least a dozen other things I didn’t even get a chance to see.

At one point we played with a huge ball maze, where you drop a ball into one of many tubes on the side of a machine and wait for it to shoot out of one of the other tubes (unpredictably, to a child, at least). Sophie’s approach to this game was to grab a ball and run off to play with other exhibits while holding it.

When it was time to leave, she was quite upset, and understandably didn’t want to leave. There was lots of crying, all of which centered on the words, “My ball! I want my ball!”

She didn’t miss playing so much as she regretted having to leave behind a ball.