From the outside, the Chesapeake Children's Museum is an unassuming brown building tucked away on Silopanna Road in Annapolis. But once inside, visitors are greeted by walls painted to look like the sky, a dinosaur mural and a wooden tugboat, big enough to climb, with its own pier.
Now 10 years old, the nonprofit museum has found a permanent home after being housed in elementary schools and shopping centers.
"People were disappointed when it had to move," said Roy Wood, whose wife, Deborah Wood, is the founder and president of the museum. "This is all the brainchild of a woman who had little kids and wanted to do something with them."
The journey from the first meeting about a museum to the opening celebration yesterday has been a long one. The museum has been moved from place to place, with volunteers storing exhibits in their basements.
After the museum's lease at the Festival at Riva Road shopping center expired, Deborah Wood asked the city for a storage site. The city answered by providing the building on Silopanna Road, which was vacant except for a transmitter from the WYRE radio station.
The building was intended for storage, but Wood, who has a doctorate in human development, saw more in the site. She liked that Spa Creek and the Spa Creek trail cross the property, and that the building offered several rooms for exhibits.
The building, however, was not suitable for use. Inspectors found asbestos, faulty wiring and PCBs (carcinogens found in old broadcasting equipment). The corridors needed to be wider, and a sprinkler system needed to be installed - in all, work that would cost about $50,000.
Wood rose to the challenge and began raising funds. Since then, she has enlisted volunteers, who have helped with painting, building and gardening, as well as cleaning up debris around the creek. And although the building was closed, Wood held activities outside, where an herb garden, a nature trail and a simulated walk on the Underground Railroad can be found.
Of completing the project, Wood said, "Once you get started, it takes on a life of its own. You start seeing all of the things that you need to do, and then all of the things you could do."
Wood and her volunteers have filled the rooms. One serves as a theater, where children will dress up and act out scenes they create. Another is a dental office, where young dentists can practice on their parents. Stuffee, a giant blue-haired doll whose organs can be pulled out, will reside in the same room.
An area for arts and crafts, a rain forest, and tanks with fish, turtles and hissing cockroaches, which are tended by local college students, also are in place.
Students in Paul Bushmann's environmental science class at Anne Arundel Community College create and tend aquatic exhibits as part of a service-learning project. They have been to Sandy Point State Park, where they collected perch and shrimp for their exhibits - one of which models Chesapeake Bay life.
"The museum is an ideal spot to send students," Bushmann said. "It's an educational give-and-take."
Wood hopes it will be a place that children and adults enjoy visiting. "It has to be engaging for the child. It has to be engaging for the adult. Or they'll get bored and leave," she said. "In most museums, it's the child who gets bored first."
Christine Vargus-Smith, an elementary-education student in the environmental science class, knows that the museum appeals to children. On a recent day, her daughter Sarah Smith, 8, was busy exploring.
"She wants to see those turtles and was even brave enough to pick one up," she said. "She spends her time between the turtles and the boat."
Many of the exhibits are intended to encourage interaction between children and adults. Wood calls the tugboat an "intergenerational activity," saying that it prompts many parents to share memories of boats with their children.
The museum's early following was parents with young children. - the median age was 2. Wood boasts that young families who were new to the area found the museum soon after they found grocery stores.
The museum will continue to cater to toddlers and hold a play group for young children, but it also might begin to appeal to an older crowd. Pupils from Bates Middle School, which is behind the museum, often pass on their way to and from school.
"They're always ... asking what's going on and if they can help," Wood said. She would like to start an after-school program, but hasn't found funding for it. An area in the basement of the museum is stocked with reference materials appropriate for middle-schoolers.
The basement also provides room for group activities. Programs for Girl Scouts have been a staple of the museum and draw troops from Delaware to Virginia. Brownies and Junior Scouts attend workshops and complete badge requirements.
Wood also wants to serve the large Hispanic community near the museum, and hopes to create, with the help of volunteers, a rotating exhibit to focus on different countries.
She has a seemingly endless list of ideas for the museum that include hiring a paid staff member next year, bringing in college students to serve as mentors for middle school pupils and offering French and Spanish lessons. She knows that she wants the museum to be a place where creativity reigns - she plans to avoid formal step-by-step instructions in activities and let youngsters think on their own.
"That's how they'll learn to solve problems when they are older," she said.
Wood practices what she preaches. In the near-empty theater room, she points to spots where costumes will be hung, where a stage covered by curtains will stand, and where an audience will sit. "I can see this because I have an imagination," she said.
Admission to the Chesapeake Children's Museum, 25 Silopanna Road, Annapolis, is $3 for age 1 and older. The museum will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., except Wednesdays, which are reserved for groups of 10 or more. Groups also may arrange visits on other days.