Sea Life and LEGOLAND add to KC's family friendly atmosphere

If you’re a parent, you’re probably well aware of the pending opening of two new kid-friendly attractions in Kansas City: the Sea Life Aquarium and LEGOLAND Discovery Center. Both are set to open sometime in the spring and promise excellent rainy day activities for Kansas City area families.

These two new attractions fill a void in our city. After all, we have an award-winning children’s science center, a sprawling zoo, several art museums and an amusement park with its own water park, yet no aquarium. To see an aquarium you have to travel across the state to St. Louis. Sea Life will definitely fix this.

LEGOLAND provides another indoor activity for kids who thrive on hands-on experiences. There will be plenty of ingenuity going on behind the doors of this facility. LEGOLAND will be the fourth Discovery Center in the nation, and it will help to put Kansas City on the map.

Sea Life will be the first of the two to open, and so far things are on track for an April opening date. LEGOLAND should open about a month later, making this summer an exciting time for Kansas City locals. Both of these new attractions are being built at Crown Center. As if the boutique shops, seasonal ice skating, live music and rotating children’s exhibits were not enough to make Crown Center a must-see attraction in our city, it will now house the two newest attractions in KC. I, for one, expect the free parking garage to be overflowing throughout the spring and early summer months as locals scramble to be among the first to experience these attractions.

Both locations will be open before Memorial Day weekend, which is strategic planning on the city’s part. Memorial Day is also the time when the city hosts Jiggle Jam, the largest independent family music festival in the nation. This means that you can take in LEGOLAND and Sea Life while experiencing the family-friendly activities of Jiggle Jam, as long as you don’t mind the crowds. A weekend pass to Jiggle Jam is just $15, so many parents are making plans to create an entire weekend out of it.

Personally, I think that the addition of these two attractions is going to be a huge boost not just for local families, but also for tourism in KC. With nearby Worlds of Fun and the rest of the attractions and activities in and around our community, I wouldn’t be surprised if we quickly rank with popular cities like Chicago and Denver as the place to go for a vacation.