Children's Museum of Acadiana

Three Lafayette women founded this museum in 1990, but it took six years and a city's worth of goodwill to open the doors. The building was already old by then — a 1935 structure that had spent its life as the Heymann Grocery Store. The renovation came together through donated labor and materials from the Acadiana community, which is the right way to build something meant for the community's children.

Before the doors opened in 1996, a large anatomy doll named Stuffee toured area schools collecting funds. Stuffee is still here, still hands-on, which tells you something about how the museum thinks about its own history.

The 15,000-square-foot space holds a Louisiana Culture Corner, a kid-scaled grocery store, a bubble exhibit, and a life-size ambulance. These aren't displays you stand back from. You work them. The grocery store and the ambulance are the two exhibits visitors talk about most — the places where a kid ends up ringing up cans or climbing into the back of a rig and staying there.

The museum is the longest-running children's museum in the eight-parish Acadiana region — the French Louisiana country where much of the state's Francophone population settled, where the descendants of expelled Acadian refugees intermarried and became Cajun. Lafayette Parish and the seven around it are the Cajun Heartland. A museum for children that has lasted three decades in that ground is worth noting.

The building sits downtown, between the two parks — Parc Sans Souci and Parc International — at 201 E. Congress Street. Admission is charged. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and Sunday 1pm to 5pm.