Robin Rombach Morgan Cook, 3, of Bethel Park, far right, plays plumber at the Waterplay exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, where kids can assemble pipes and sprinkler heads into fountains, or build boats and float them around a 53-foot water table and river course. Click photo for larger image. Related article: Child's-eye view finds museum offers a great big place to play

For a kid's-eye view of the expanded Children's Museum, I took along the kids I know best, my niece's children -- Victoria, who's almost 10, and Kade, who's 4. Their assignment: Help me evaluate the museum and its many new exhibits.

We landed at the museum's door on Monday, Martin Luther King Day. It would be a good day to test the museum's mettle -- with schools closed, the place was likely to be crawling with kids.

It was. The museum opened at 10 a.m., and by the time we arrived at 11:30, outerwear in the unstaffed coat alcove already was in overflow mode, piled on and under benches. With no empty hangers in sight, I wrapped the children's coats inside mine, put them on a bench and hoped for the best.

The new entry is in the new building, the lantern-like structure that connects the existing museum building -- the former Allegheny Post Office -- with the former Buhl Planetarium building, now a wing of the museum. The $28 million expansion more than triples the museum's indoor public and exhibit areas, from 11,000 to about 40,000 square feet.

That means there's much more to see and do. So, to help plan your time, be sure to look over the two handouts given at admission -- the floor plan and the daily events and programs listing, which on Monday included the reading of a story about King and a saxophonist playing jazz in the art studio.

The theme of the expansion is "play with real stuff," which dovetails with the museum's mission to nurture children's innate joy, creativity and curiosity. Although its interpretation is still in the planning stage, the biggest exhibit is the building itself, designed by Koning Eizenberg Architects of Santa Monica, Calif., who collaborated with artist Ned Kahn on the lantern. Its glass walls are shielded from the sun by about 43,000 translucent plastic flaps, each 5 1/2 inches square, which ripple in the wind like moving clouds.

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette The "Limb Bender" in the museum's new lantern building, separates the lobby and staircase from the "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" exhibit. Click photo for larger image.

Inside, the expansion design complements rather than competes with exhibits, many of which employ sophisticated technologies in the service of sensory, artful experience and are as appealing to adults as to children.

I gave Tori a reporter's notebook and pen; I would record Kade's impressions as we went along. From the coat room, he spied an old favorite and made a beeline for it -- the climbing structure in the center of the Post Office wing; it's now surrounded by the art studio that had occupied the basement. He scampered up, but Tori soon discovered she had gotten too tall. She looked over the studio offerings -- clay, printmaking, papermaking and painting -- making mental notes about what to try later.

Back in the lantern building, another climber, the old "Limb Bender" from the museum's early days, attracted and accommodated both of them. It functions as climbing structure and dividing wall, separating the lobby and stairs from the expanded Mister Rogers exhibit.

I had decided to let the children structure the day around what interested them, and, under Tori's lead, they breezed by Mister Rogers and headed straight for the first room in the Buhl wing -- the Attic, a sort of funhouse of mysterious, illusionary exhibits designed to challenge the senses. We all climbed the steps to the Gravity Room, about which our photographer, Robin Rombach, had warned me: "I can't even stand to look in that room."

We peeked around the wall and saw why: The walls and checkerboard-painted floor are tilted 25 degrees, causing disoriented kids and grown-ups to stagger through. The room's lesson, I read later on the museum's Web site, is that when conflicting information is sent to the eyes and inner ear, we can't always rely on our senses to tell us what is real. Kade had had a stomach virus the day before, so we all backed down. A few minutes later, Tori got game. She walked through the room, slid down the wooden exit slide and announced, "That wasn't so bad."

When she went back for more, Kade followed. And then, dutifully, Robin and her cameras. At the bottom of the slide, I awaited their exit, which Kade made on his tummy, leading with his hands and beaming face.

"My favorite slide was at the bended house," he would say at the end of the day. "The curly slide made me get a brush burn."

The speedy, spiral slide is in the Garage/Workshop, housed under the Buhl's dome, where decades ago we watched in wonder as the Zeiss projector emerged like a giant, scary, silhouetted ant from the floor and expanded our world into the universe. It has been sad to see it pass, and I'd hoped for at least one exhibit that exploits the shape of the dome or acknowledges its starry past. While some of the exhibits it houses were designed for tall spaces, none takes advantage of or calls attention to the dome and its scrim -- although a future interpretive program could.

Several exhibits do invite children to look up, to climb rope nets to a deck, drop parachutes from it and follow balls as they navigate a high-wire course. There's much more to do under the dome: In the garage, kids can take the wheel of a Mini Cooper, pretend to wash its windows and fill its gas tank and learn how its engine works. In the workshop, children can build with wood and take apart household appliances to see how they work.

But after 15 minutes under the dome, Tori was anxious to use the art studio, so we headed back there. Clay was her choice, and as she took a lump from the big pile and began to work it, Kade and I went for the easels. There are six of them, accommodating 18 small painters.

"That's the sun, that's tar, that's a dinosaur, that's tar, that's the ocean," he explained when I asked him to tell me about his painting.

When he finished, we put it through the drier, walked it over to the wire racks and slid it in for pickup later. There were staffers everywhere in the crowded studio, channeling chaos into creativity with skill, patience and grace.

It was time for lunch. We headed for the Buhl's first floor, now the museum's Grand Hall and cafe, where giant, inflated, illuminated spheres (designed by the architects, with Vortex Lighting of Hollywood) bobbed above us as we walked to the snack bar. Despite the full house, it was a short wait in line. We found a table and waited for our order number to be called, and a few minutes later the kids, entranced by Joe Lyons' juggling, were ignoring their french fries.

After the show, they headed back to the Attic, clearly a favorite. In one darkened room, a flash of light allowed us to freeze our shadows on the white wall, where afterimages linger for a few fascinating seconds. Another exhibit, Pepper's Ghost, which mixes images from two rooms to create an otherworldly effect, is more of a puzzle, and it took Tori several minutes to figure it out and explain it to Kade (and me). Kade, meanwhile, kept going back to the wavy mirrors that stretched his chin and legs and made him laugh: "I look so tall!"

It was good to see these 21st-century kids as intrigued by low-tech exhibits as they were by the brilliant, interactive, video art pieces encountered on screens throughout the museum, like Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv's "Text Rain." With our own images projected on a screen, we could catch, lift and play with falling letters projected on the same screen. The letters make words and the words make an elusive poem.

Although neither child had watched much of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," both found something to respond to in this exhibit, which re-creates the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and is designed to emphasize the same caring, sharing lessons and strong work ethic Fred Rogers communicates in his television shows. Children can play along with a player piano, put on a puppet show and press their hands and faces into a free-standing wall of small, movable plastic tubes and then see their images pop out on the other side.

There was much we didn't get to, partly because some popular exhibits, like the interactive, computer-animated puppet shows with "no strings attached," always seemed to be occupied, and partly because four hours simply wasn't enough time. No matter; this was a sampling, exploratory exhibit, one that convinced us to come back again and again.

When we picked up Kade's paintings and print, I asked one of the art studio staffers if she had any idea how many people had visited during the day. About 1,600, she estimated.

Tori shot me a look.

"You should write that down," she said, then ran to her own notebook to do just that. At the end of the day, the official count was 1,298, about half the record attendance of about 2,500 set the day after Thanksgiving.

We made the obligatory stop in the museum store, which is just the right size -- small, to keep the focus on experience, not acquisition. Tori choose a magnetic Spanish poetry kit, and Kade picked out two tiny rubber snakes, named them Snakey and Snack and pretended to feed one to the other.

Our coats, it turned out, were just where we left them. The museum soon will be adding more hooks, but that may not be enough to accommodate big crowds on cold days. Attendance has surpassed projections by 5 percent, with more than twice the visitors (31,518) coming in November and December over the same two months of 2003 (15,097).