Our trips to Rock Hill are almost always the same: we go to visit family. It’s a rhythm, as predictable as the beat of a Sousa march. That’s not meant to be a complaint: there’s comfort in ritual.

Yet sometimes, it’s good to change the beat a little. K, with her adventuring spirit, is always a catalyst for those changes.

“Did you know there’s a children’s museum in Rock Hill?” she asked earlier this week. “Maybe we could go on Sunday, after we meet with family.” I did not know, but after a lazy morning, we head out for Main Street in downtown Rock Hill.

The museum is small — minuscule, in fact, compared to the Children’s Museum of the Upstate here in Greenville, which is three stories of adventure. Yet L doesn’t complain. She takes off exploring immediately.

Papa doesn’t complain either. He gets the Boy, who at eleven weeks looks and feels (he weighs over sixteen pounds already and is already wearing clothes for babies six to nine months old) much older than he is.

The Girl, though, has no time to sit for pictures with Papa, or anyone else for that matter. There is a pulley systems to explore.

And a scale with a barrel of bean bags beside it.

“Which do you think weighs more? A round one or a square one?” I ask. We perform an impromptu experiment to determine that square ones weigh a touch more.

But what happens if we put them all in? Every last bean bag?

And what happens if we put everything in sight into the sale?

Soon, she’s creating magnet art with K, exploring the dress up room (located inside a vault — the building used to house a bank), and returning to her favorite stations.

In the end, she finds perfection: a small kitchen with two buckets of bean bags. She spreads them all over the floor, then takes the broom and sweeps them into piles before collecting them in small wooden buckets she later dumps into the barrels.

“Daddy, I’m Cinderella,” she begins, and I know the rest: “And you’re the evil step-mother.” I tell her how awfully she’s cleaning, then kiss her and remind her, “We’re just playing, remember? I don’t really think you’re doing an awful job.”

“Oh, I know.”