Universe Star

We began December with grand plans to see Chicago's many museums while we were living downtown. But our apartment search dragged longer than we anticipated, the month passed quickly, and we only got to the children's museum and the aquarium before it was over.

Thankfully, the city offers many incentives to draw you back down there, like free days and weeks and even months at certain institutions and a library pass that can get a family of four into any of them for free on any given day.

The Adler Planetarium, which bills itself as America's first such facility, was free all of last week. So we decided to go there on Friday. Mom and Dad weren't even sure what it would have to offer a 3-year-old. But Levynn liked it!

It was a legitimate museum with a building full of exhibits and shows, including a 3-D video about the Milky Way that couldn't have had a more impressed visitor all day than our girl. Balancing the oversized 3-D glasses on her nose, she gushed "Whoa" and "Wow" when the heavenly bodies seemed to shoot toward us, and she tried to grab them out of the air. No one else even made a peep. Dad thoroughly enjoyed that.

In the video below, which was filmed one day later, Levynn shows a little of what she learned. And yes, the ball-in-frisbee was 100-percent her own idea.