Surprise Mold-A-Rama!

When my mom was visiting recently we took her on her first visit to the Milwaukee County Zoo, and what did we stumble across?  A new Mold-A-Rama!  One we've never seen before anywhere:  A cow!

How cool is that?  We knew they had a hippo now (a rare figure--we only have one other that we found in Florida on our big Mold-A-Rama road trip) because Aden picked one up for the family collection when she was at the zoo on a field trip last month.

Mold-A-Rama Update

We're still waiting for warmer weather to want to work on our own Mold-A-Rama machine (which has a leak we need to fix, and there is still the problem of the coin return that shoots money back inside the machine), but in the meantime we got an unexpected addition to our collection!

Last year I was contacted by someone in Tennessee who came across my blog and said she collected Mold-A-Ramas, and would we be willing to trade?  I told her we liked the fun of going to the places and getting them ourselves, but that if she paid us back we'd be happy to pick things up in our area of the country and send them to her.  We ended up getting her figures from our zoo here in Milwaukee, along with things from Toledo, Detroit, and Chicago.  (Someday we will get to the Como Park Zoo and we'll be sure to pick her up some more there.)

She was pleased with the box of Mold-A-Ramas we sent her, and the other day (right around my birthday no less) we got a surprise package from her!  Four retired figures from the Knoxville Zoo that we wouldn't be able to get anyway, even if we visited, including a chimp we've never seen before:

Filling in Gaps

Either you are a collector or you aren't.  It's an irrational tendency disguised by order.  Some of us simply derive deep satisfaction from grouping items until they seem to create something complete.  In its healthy forms it's admirable (as in assembling collections of art or insects, etc. for learning and appreciation), and in its unhealthy forms it's a sickness (as in hoarding and obsession.)  Any of us with the desire to collect must struggle with what we think we want vs what is reasonable (in terms of space and expense and sanity).

I remember one of my brothers telling me he blamed Bert from Sesame Street for his own bottle cap collection as a child, because there was an episode where Bert placed the last bottle cap in the gap in his perfectly mounted collection and was happy.  It looked so simple!  So my brother began collecting bottle caps, hoping to achieve that same perfect sense of accomplishment when he had them all, only to discover that you can never have them all.  He had many bottle caps before he realized there would be no perfect sense of completion to that project, and he let that collection go.

I grew up in a home of many collections.  My husband whose home had more limited space did not.  He's content to read everything on a Kindle, but I prefer real books that I can then add to my shelves.  He doesn't crave physical reminders of places and events the way I do.  His needs require far less storage than mine, and there are days I envy that.  Especially as I watch my children attempt to save everything from everywhere and it becomes harder and harder to organize the clutter.  I don't have much of a leg to stand on when I find my own rocks or Rubik's cubes impossible to part with, but find their bottle collections or piles of perler bead creations hard to bear.

But collecting, when managed properly, is fun.  Our family Mold-A-Rama collection is fun.  And when a collection reaches a certain size it becomes less about amassing things and more about filling in gaps.  We'll never reach that perfect Bert moment of popping that last piece into place, but as we focus in on finding the things farther out of reach there is real satisfaction to placing figures on our shelves that are odd or harder to get.

Mold-A-Ramas in the Miami Area (the Museum of Discovery and Science, Zoo Miami, Monkey Jungle, and Seaquarium)

In the continuing (and are you thinking endless?) saga of our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip, we went from Orlando down to Delray Beach to visit my aunt and uncle, and on our way south stopped in Ft Lauderdale for a quick trip to the Museum of Discovery and Science.  It was free with our reciprocal membership to Discovery World here in Milwaukee, and we spent a couple of hours there.

It's a small science museum, but what they had they did well.  We saw our first spiny lobster, and they also had fish and turtles.  The giant shark sculpture was kind of cool.  The second floor had a lot of puzzles to solve, which kept us busy, and they also had an exhibit on "fear" which was interesting.  They had a great screen where you had to use your shadow to catch fruit falling from a tree without being attacked by a shadow lion.  Quinn was amused to pieces antagonizing that virtual cat and happily did that until closing time.

There was one Mold-A-Rama machine at the Museum of Discovery and Science, and that's where we got our second fighter jet.

Mold-A-Ramas at Central Florida Zoo, Wonderworks, and Gatorland

After Knoxville, and a night in the southern end of Georgia, we headed on to the Orlando area part of our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip where we had three stops to make.

Our first stop in Florida (after the Visitor Center and its free orange juice) was the Central Florida Zoo in Sanford.  It's got to be hard to be any kind of small attraction near Orlando, and it's a very small zoo, but we liked it.  It will always hold a special place in our hearts for being the first place where we touched a palm tree, and for giving us our first moments of real warmth during a truly miserable winter.

The zoo was small enough that nearly every animal in it was pictured on the map, and the only large animal they had was a rhino.  They were getting ready to open a giraffe exhibit, and we actually saw the trailer pulling up with the giraffe delivery as we were leaving!  They had the smallest amphibian display we've ever seen.  There was a tiny building with a door, and when we opened it we realized that little space with a wall with four or five tiny windows in it was the whole thing.  It was like a mini-zoo, but everything was nicely displayed and well-maintained.  All of it was built on boardwalks, and there were covered areas strewn about to hide from the sporadic rainstorms.

We also saw this on our way into the park which we found interesting:

Mold-A-Rama Road Trip!

I come from a family of collectors.  I have most certainly passed that gene along to my children.  (My husband, poor man, is surrounded by other people's "precious" things, but at least we are unlikely to move again anytime in the foreseeable future, so he won't have to suffer lifting endless boxes of books and rocks.  Every time we've moved books he's paused to show me how light his library card is.)  There is something satisfying about filling in gaps in a collection, and something oddly comforting about seeing evidence of experiences you've had all lined up on a shelf.

Mold-A-Ramas across the mantle

Our Mold-A-Rama collection is the first one we've tried to do as a family and it's been incredibly fun.  Mold-A-Rama figures are not expensive, they're silly, they are just rare enough to be exciting, and best of all the pursuit of them has taken us to interesting places we otherwise would have never gone.

Which brings us to our trip to Florida.

When we first looked at the map of places one can find Mold-A-Ramas we essentially wrote off most of them as impossible.  We would collect what we could in the Midwest, and maybe eventually hit the one location out on the West Coast on a visit to relatives that direction, but anywhere in the South?  Why would we go there?

But then we began to think, why not go there? 

It sparked an idea.  An idea that led us to escape the brutal Wisconsin winter for a couple of weeks and enjoy some wonderful time together.  We weren't sure we could hit everything on our list, but we aimed to try, and we succeeded!  Two places were closed this time of year (Adventure Island in Tampa supposedly has one Mold-A-Rama machine, and some kind of Microcar Museum in Georgia we think has four), but everything else we knew of that was open we got to.  Our list included:

Holiday Mold-A-Ramas at the Brookfield Zoo

I have to say, the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois takes its Mold-A-Ramas seriously. 

When we started our collection last year the only Mold-A-Rama machines we had any experience with were at the Milwaukee County Zoo.  A few of those machines are inside buildings, but several just suffer the extremes of Wisconsin weather year round.  (Even the indoor machines look a bit worse for wear.)  Everywhere else we've been the machines are in much better shape.

On a recent visit to the Brookfield Zoo again we got a clue as to why.  When we went the first time in the fall when the weather was pleasant, most of the machines were outside (but covered).  When we returned recently to collect six new figures, all the outdoor machines had been moved to indoor locations.  What a concept!

Mold-A-Ramas at the Willis Tower, and Quinn Turns Seven

Do you know the story of the Taoist Farmer?  I heard it the first time in a martial arts class many years ago.  The version of the story I remember is that the farmer's horse runs away, which seems like bad luck, but then the horse returns with two wild horses, which seems like good luck.  Then one of the wild horses throws the farmer's son breaking the boy's leg which seems like bad luck, until all the able-bodied men in the village are soon conscripted into war.

Quinn's recent birthday felt like that all day.  There were both figurative and literal ups and downs, actual dark clouds along with rainbows and tears.  It was exhausting, and not a birthday we are likely to forget.

When I asked Quinn a few weeks ago what he'd like to do for his seventh birthday he was ambivalent.  Since he could take or leave a friend party, I decided we should just stick with family and do something interesting.  I suggested a trip to the Willis Tower (still the Sears Tower in my heart) for a trip to the Sky Deck and to add the two Mold-A-Ramas they offer there to our collection.  He loved the idea.

My thought was that if we were going to make the visit to the Willis Tower for Mold-A-Ramas at some point anyway, may as well tie the overpriced experience to an important moment.  I figured every time we drive through Chicago in the future we will see that famous skyscraper and remember celebrating Quinn turning seven.  What could go wrong?

Well, the weather, of course.  We woke up to rain, and wondered if driving all the way to Chicago just to look at the inside of a cloud at 1,353 feet up in the air was worth the trouble.  With the Museum of Science and Industry as a backup plan we decided to chance it.

By the time we reached Chicago the clouds had broken up and we decided to the top of the Willis Tower we would go.  We parked several blocks away, enjoyed a windy walk downtown, made our way through several lines to buy tickets (Ian was free with his military I.D.!) and wait for an elevator, and then we were on the Sky Deck.

It really is amazing.  Pricey enough I doubt we'll do it again, but certainly worth doing once.  The views every direction are tremendous, and there are four glass decks that protrude a few feet out from the building so you can look down to the ground underneath you from where you are standing.  The kids all felt very brave.