The Betty Brinn Children’s Museum is located in Milwaulkee, WI, in the Miller Pavilion at O’Donnell Park.
Admission to the museum is $8 for adults and children age one and older. Children under the age of one are free, and seniors receive a reduced admission rate of $7. Members of the museum are admitted free.
Betty Brinn Children’s Museum is a member of the Association of Children’s Museums Reciprocal Program. For more information on the Reciprocal Program, it’s participants and benefits, please see our Resources page.
After numerous positive and successful outings with them, I took the duo to the Children’s Museum one cloudy and rainy morning. Alone.
It didn’t take long before I started to think maybe this wasn’t the brightest idea.
At this age (not quite 18 months), the duo were just starting to exert their independence. This lead to the necessity of stroller usage anywhere we went, just the three of us. I had become quite creative with finding little areas they could explore, while still staying somewhat ‘fenced in’. It’s all about the strategy!
In this case, however, the museum just isn’t set up for stroller accessibility, or at least not a tandem double stroller, like our City Select with second seat. To be honest, I’m not sure our SBS would have fared any better.
As it turns out, I don’t think it would have made too much of a difference, anyway. Most of the exhibits were not only too advanced, but also too big for the duo. I would have been lifting them up one by one all day if we tried to really play in the museum. Instead, we made a beeline straight for the Pocket Park area, meant for preschool age children and infants.
This area is completely enclosed, so we were able to park the stroller, and let the kids free. To say they loved this area would be a major understatement. There were so many little nooks and crannies to explore, including stairs to climb, and a slide, a vertical garden with carts to transport your freshly picked produce, an area for puzzles, and a pretend pond for fishing. I think they spend half of the time just pulling the carts up and over the bridge crossing the pond!
In the end, we had a lot of fun, and it was a safe way for the kids to get some energy out. The cost was relatively reasonable, compared to other museums we’ve been to, but I’m still not a fan of charging adults and children the same price.
We will most likely be returning to Milwaukee in the future, so I’m excited to see the kids get more out of this museum. It was clean and each of the exhibits looked entertaining and educational- I was bummed that we couldn’t see more of it!