The Original Playhouse Children’s Museum

This place is awesome, totally worth the drive from MoCo! My kids really enjoyed it, and it’s very different from most kid attractions in the DC area!

I am visiting family that live in northern MD and wanted to meet up with a close friend of ours lives in Northern VA. We split the distance (about an hour and 15 mins each) and drove to The Original Playhouse to meet up and allow our kiddos (ages 3, 2, and 18 mo) play around. We had a blast! It was a little crowded because of a field trip that was also there visiting but there was plenty to do and our kiddos had so much fun with all of the different themed rooms. The great thing is once the field trip left we had the place to ourselves! You can look on their website to see when field trips are scheduled to avoid the crowd but it honestly wasn’t bad at all. We will definitely visit again when we are in town!

My four year old son loved this place! We spent about 4 hours there with a break in the middle for lunch. He spent almost two of them in the building room alone, playing with Legos, a wooden train set, a marble set, a magnetic building set, and a rice trough, among other things. He enjoyed pretend shopping at the Ugandan marketplace upstairs and pretending to cook and serve meals. In other rooms, he put on a puppet show and pretended to give all the stuffed animals a checkup with the veterinarian kit. He ended the day by making a train out of recyclable materials in the art room. The owner was very nice and there was ample parking in the lot behind the house, you just have to walk up a short alley and around. The Playhouse was very clean and my son was already asking to come back again as we went out the door.

This place is awesome, an old house converted into a play land for kids. Though they recommend kids be three or older, my two and a half year old LOVED it and didn’t want to leave. Upstairs is all dramatic play– there’s a theater room with costumes and a stage (and handmade scripts), an animal room with gerbils (yes, they were real) and tons of plush and plastic animals, and two rooms devoted to Uganda– a marketplace and a home. Downstairs is all sensory– there’s a giant space for art, a water room where kids can catch (foam) fish and be inside a giant bubble… And then a room of Legos, balls, blocks, a rice station where they can mine treasures…
I also love that there are lots of murals, pictures with informational captions, and signs with rules and skills to work on with the kids– like sharing, cleaning up, including others in play, etc.
I’m sure I’m forgetting tons of things, for a small row house there is no end to the things kids can explore.
I also love the website, which includes an events page where you can see if it will be swamped with field trips… (hint hint those are the days to avoid)
And the owner is so nice– she was a teacher and she takes time to get to know the parents and kids… She very open And helpful.
Next time we go i will definitely bring a towel for the water room, and we may plan our crafts out more– they have a ton of supplies to make all our pinterest dreams come true!
We will definitely go back and probably buy passes (5 visits for the price of 4) but Two things that were surprising to me and that I could see as potential issues at some point in the future–
1. Parents are expected to participate with the kids, as there are no staff in the rooms to monitor the water areA, help with crafts, clean up, etc. When we went today all the parents were hands on, but I can definitely imagine some parents who would just let their kids run wild and unsupervised– in a small space that would easily ruin a visit for other kids…
2. The theater room has hats and costumes. I didn’t think about it until we were leaving, but it seems like an easy way to spread lice and other stuff kids pick up… You’ve got to trust that parents wouldn’t let their kids go if they had something like that…
However, neither of those things is enough to deter me from being a regular guest… We will be back soon!