Martha Rial photos, Post-Gazette Amelia Samandari, 9, of Mt. Lebanon reads "Where the Wild Things Are" while visiting the "kid size: The Material World of Childhood" exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Art, Oakland. Click photo for larger image.

James Boston, 5, spins around on the gallery floor of the Carnegie Museum of Art in a shiny red shell-shaped toy.

His mother, Karen, 40, plops into one, too, hugging her knees for maximum twirl. "Do you feel like a turtle, James?" asks the Upper St. Clair mother, laughing.

This is sheer silliness more fitting for a playground than the hushed environs of an art museum, but none of the guards raise their eyebrows or flash them THE LOOK.

Being a kid -- or at least acting or thinking like one -- is the point of the Carnegie's new exhibition, "kid size: The Material World of Childhood," which runs through Sept. 11.

"I want people to remember the feeling of a summer day, and it's 8:30 at night and the sun hasn't set yet," says Elisabeth Agro, the curator who organized the Pittsburgh presentation. "Your only worry is hearing your mom yell, 'It's time for bed.' "

The traveling exhibition showcases more than 130 everyday objects designed for children over the past 300 years. Museum-goers can gawk at everything from a mint-condition 1969 plastic Big Wheel to a 1750s Louis XV child's armchair.

The collection reflects the changing attitudes of parents toward children -- from "little adults" who had to be tamed, to individuals with their own way of relating to the world with their own expensive gear.

Instead of white walls and muffled voices, it's brightly painted walls with geometric shapes and piped-in playground shouts, cricket chirps and the slamming of lockers. Anne Mundell, a drama professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Dale McNutt of Soho Inventions Inc. designed the exhibition.

Cason TeVault, left, 3, of Squirrel Hill takes a spin while his brother, Connor, 9, watches. Click photo for larger image.

The six sections of the exhibition have their own entrance -- a fancifully painted 14-foot-high house, complete with an adult's door and a small kid's door.

Ellen Grosh, 5, of Oakland, walks through the little door and lets out a delighted shriek.

"This is great," says Agro, also the museum's assistant curator of decorative arts, catching Ellen's glee. "How often do you see a little girl acting excited at an art museum? They usually run to the dinosaurs."

Ellen, sitting next to her twin sister, Hayley, says, "I like to see what kids had a long time ago."

Most of those artifacts -- inviting-looking little chairs and wagons and perambulators -- are on platforms away from little hands. But you will hear less of the parental refrain of "Don't Touch" because there are hands-on activities in each of the six sections.

In the section called "I Won't Grow Up," children can play with Bilibo, the Swiss shell-shaped plastic toy, and a 1950s American wooden abstract rocking toy. Other areas let kids make paper cradles and chairs and carry baby dolls in slings.

"This is very good. It is very tough when you are in places where it is 'no touch,' " says Ann Stewart-Akers of Penn Hills as her 4-year-old son, Kyle, rocks happily on a wooden toy. Then he puts the Bilibo toy on his head, a la Darth Vader.

The "kid size" exhibition was organized by the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, and has been traveling through Europe and Asia and the United States for the past seven years. This is its third and final stop in the United States.

Agro added her own playful flourishes to the exhibition, finding plenty of inspiration at home. She calls her 4-year-old daughter, Gianna, "my muse," and her husband, Robert Jacobson, "my eldest child."

	Clair Danylo, 8, of Kilbuck, sketches a rabbit and bear while visiting the "kid size" exhibit. Click photo for larger image.

Agro thought the exhibition was too Euro-centric, so she went looking high and low for quintessential American kid's design items.

The 38-year-old grew up in Long Island, banging around on Big Wheels, the first plastic-formed pedal toy. A generation of children in the '70s remember the feel of plastic speeding over sidewalk cracks and the thrill of pulling the hand brake and spinning out. Banging up your Big Wheel was a point of pride.

"We killed them," Agro says. "We used them until they limped to the garbage can."

So it was daunting to find a Big Wheel in good condition. Agro looked for eight months before finding one on loan from the Official Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville, W.Va.

"It was a coup," she says.

Agro also had to find new objects that reflected the red-hot and ever-changing children's market.

"The kids' market is the group to target. There is Pottery Barn Kids, Ethan Allen kids. Do a Google search on kid's design. It's amazing what is there."

Some of the new kids' paraphernalia is not of good quality, she says, while others are inspired, such as the $750 Bugaboo Frog stroller on display at the museum. "It's not like an SUV stroller. It is like a Porsche stroller, sleek." The wheels adjust so you can use it on any terrain. Other modern items include several bright foam chairs from Tarantino of New Jersey.

If these items treat children as their own little imaginative beings, then the opposite philosophy can be found in a 1900 wooden walking frame from France, the ultimate in punitive toddler containment.

"It looks like a torture device," Agro says of the austere-looking wooden holding device that let toddlers walk a few horizontal steps. It's a reflection of the Draconian approach to child-rearing in the mid-19th century.

Sitting near it was the more humane, modern method of toddler containment -- the colorful Evenflo ExerSaucer. "It's containing yet safe and fun," Agro says.

The rarest object in the exhibition is the 1660 wooden cradle from Plymouth, Mass. "It is the quintessential cradle," Agro says. Only wealthy families in the 17th century could afford one, she says.

Also attracting attention is a 1970s potty bench from East Germany with four little seats for group elimination and socialization.

Darcie TeVault of Squirrel Hill, and her two boys, Connor, 9, and Cason, 3, were pointing and laughing at it.

Darcie says she was interested on how cultures around the world came up with similar objects for their babies and children.

And Connor was surveying the various designs of chairs for kids. "That is a funny bird chair," he says, pointing to a 2002 creation by the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio, a big web-footed stuffed animal of a chair, just inviting a kid to pounce on and fly away.