Disclaimer: Please do not tell my boss I’m writing this. This honestly could get me fired if they read what I’m about to say about the DuPage Children’s Museum. All that is said is meant to be humorous, I do actually like my job.
When I was little I would enjoy every visit that I took to the DuPage Children’s Museum. For my 4th and 5th birthday the only thing I wanted to do was take a trip to the museum. Before I began working there I still looked at the museum with awe, but all of that changed March of 2021. Follow along with me as I walk through every shift you can work at the children’s museum and the truth on the inner-workings of DCM.
AWEsome Energy, Build it, and Make it Move (east side)
East side is the biggest exhibit in the entire museum. When people think of DCM, they think of east side. You know the water table you loved to visit when you were a kid? Maybe the Construction House? Maybe the big purple chair that you took your picture in as a kid? All on east side, plus more. There’s a tie for my least favorite section of east side between the water section and ramps & rollers. The water section includes the water table, water wall, and the bubble booth. Any time I have to clean the water table or wall I end up soaked, and don’t even get me started on cleaning the plexi water dome. To clean the plexi water dome, I have to squeeze my adult-sized body into a child-sized space in order to reach the dome. But ramps & rollers, it might just top the water section. Ramps & rollers has wooden blocks meant for creating your own racetrack for a golf ball, and kids will use every. single. block. to create their ramps. Some days, I just have to leave ramps & rollers a mess because the minute I start picking up or have fully cleaned up, a new kid will come over and undo everything I just did. Plus, I swear every child that ever gets lost at DCM only ever gets lost on east side.
Creativity Connections (west side)
One of the worst exhibits to open is west side. There are so many toys that you have to swap (swapping means taking a toy off the floor and putting the same toy back, except the new toy going onto the floor has been bleached and sanitized for the new day) that opening takes at least 15 minutes. Then, once you’re done swapping the toys, you then have to sanitize some of them because they can’t be dipped (if you’re confused what dipped means I explain it in the Float section). But, this can be a perk because you can hide up by the front desk and talk with whomever is scheduled at the front while you clean those toys. One of my best memories from working at DCM actually took place on west side. I was working at Adaptive Play, which is a night we have once a month where we close the museum to regular guests and allow guests and members with adaptive needs to enjoy the museum. We regulate how many guests are in attendance, dim lights, and turn off any exhibits that may cause overstimulation. I was sitting by the magnatiles when a family with two adaptive kids came up to me, and I began playing with the two kids. All of a sudden, the two decided that we were going to play a game where I sat by magnatiles and they ran around the motion projector, and everytime they ran past me I had to say, “Aaaaaand there they go!” or, “Hello again!” Everytime I’d say it they’d laugh so hard and just keep running so I’d say it again. By the end of the game myself, the two kids, and their adult that came with them were all laughing. Besides opening west side, I can’t really complain about this exhibit, it’s not too bad.
The Studio
If you don’t pay attention to the Studio, it can become a mess in less than a second. The Studio is our arts and crafts exhibit where we have a different craft station on one side of the room every week and our typical selection of markers, crayons, and paper on the other. Other than that, it’s a pretty great shift to work. I get to pick the music playing and usually pick instrumental versions of popular songs and when it’s not busy I get to make as many crafts as I want. Most of the decorations on the walls are actually mine because when we first reopened after our Annual Maintenance Period, I was the first person to work the Studio and the walls were completely blank, so I took it upon myself to fill them.
Construction House
I love the Construction House!! When I see I’m scheduled to work in the construction house, I know it’s going to be a good shift, especially if one of my work friends is on east side, so we can just gossip the whole time. For some reason, everytime one of my male coworkers is working on east and I’m in CH, they find their way in to do anything besides cleaning their area. One time, I was so fed up with my coworker being there that I turned to him and asked, “Is it quiet on east today? [he responded with “Uhm, I don’t know”] Oh I just figured it was because you’ve been in here all day” (I knew it was not quiet, I could see the hot mess erupting out of east side from CH). He quickly left the Construction House and has not bothered me since that interaction. I think the moment I will remember the most vividly from all my time working in Construction House was a couple weekends ago. I was sweeping up some saw dust so it’d be easier for me to close later that night and I only had one family working inside the house at the time. The family consisted of mom, grandpa, daughter, and son (I only know this because they told me when I told them the rules of CH, otherwise as a GEF I’m not allowed to assume how/if anyone is related within a party). Midway through building, the mom turned to her daughter and told her that they needed to leave with only the explanation of, “This isn’t for girls.” The daughter began to cry as she tried to explain to her mother that the Construction House is in fact for girls and her mom continually repeated the opposite. It took everything in my being to bite my tongue and continue sweeping because it completely broke my heart listening to this interaction.
Math/Questioneers (upstairs)
Remember when I said west is the worst exhibit to open? Ya, scratch that, Math is the worst exhibit to open. Every other day we have to swap the Legos, meaning I have to collect every single Lego we have in the exhibit, put them in laundry bags, and then replace them with another obscene amount of clean Legos. We also have the Unit Block station upstairs, which if you turn your back to it for too long, some kid will take every single block out and lay them out across the entire floor. It also gets insanely boring upstairs because it is just you, you can’t wander to other exhibits to talk to people, cause it’s the only upstairs exhibit. I’m excited for Questioneers to come back to our upstairs exhibit though. Our upstairs exhibit is our traveling exhibit so we get a new one every so often, and in January we’re getting an exhibit we had last year back. Questioneers is based on a series of children’s books and I like it so much better than Math.
Float
Honestly my favorite shift at the museum, especially when I’m not in the mood for children that day because when you work float you don’t have to interact with kids. As a float, you take care of the dirty swapped toys. You take the big shopping cart to each exhibit, collect their dirty toys, and take them to what I like to call, “the back rooms.” “The back rooms” are actually just our room in the basement where we keep the bleach and clean the toys. So, you take the dirty toys and drop them into a sink full of part water, part bleach, pull them out, put them into a bucket of cold water, pull them out, and place them on the drying racks. That is dipping. That’s about all you do as a float, plus you cover people’s breaks.
There are some other shifts you could have as a GEF (front desk, birthday parties, and rentals) but these are the main shifts. I will say, working rentals is fun because you’re working the birthday parties of the people that got $$$ and you know that they do cause they literally rent out the museum after hours for their party. I once got a massive tip just for working a rental. All in all, I do actually like my job at the museum, it’s just fun to joke about everything that happens.
Working at DCM actually sounds incredibly fun. You’re definitely right about remembering the east side when we think of DCM. Other than those water tables, the only other things I can remember are the vending machines in the basement and the fake train that used to be upstairs (I think they changed that?). Oh wait, and the construction workshop! I think my favorite thing to do was probably nail those bottle caps onto blocks of wood to make “cars.”
Reading this post definitely gave me some flashbacks. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure when the last time I was in the museum was. I think it was in 6th grade, when my baby cousins came to visit, but I’m not completely sure. Either way, I don’t remember the math section at all, nor do I remember the arts and crafts area. That might be because I just don’t remember, but is there any chance those things were added more recently?