Indy Children’s Museum

Yesterday morning we woke up, packed lunches, and hopped in the car to head to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. After my sneak peak of the place a few weeks ago I couldn’t wait to come back as a family. We met up with our friends Hannah and Ryan who just moved to the Indy area for a fun Saturday adventure.

The glass sculpture was pretty impressive. Emily looked up once and gave a shout of excitement, but she was mostly interested in watching the digital glass blowing tutorial that Andrew was working on.

We were surprised to discover that Emily LOVES model trains. She followed this one around on her own two feet for quite awhile and was super thrilled when Andrew helped her take a closer look.

She kept leaving the other exhibits to come look at the trains.

There was a National Geographic Archaeology exhibit that highlighted finds in Egypt, China, and the ocean. It was cool to see some snippets of Egypt that I had seen in person four years ago. Emily identified the jar with the dog on it (she’s signing dog).

Hannah, Ryan, and Emily assembling a statue of a terracotta warrior. I’ve seen many pictures over the years of the Terracotta Army but I didn’t realize how large each statue was.

Emily tried her hand at uncovering some statues at the dig site.

It was easier to see her delicate work without the gogles.

We hopped on a train car and took a ride, watching scenes of a work crew fixing the tracks.

Emily is notifying us that she pushed her train really hard and now it is on the bridge and she can’t reach it.

There were a lot of dinosaurs. I supposed I should have been clued in since there are two dinosaurs climbing into the museum entrance outside and one smashing the outside of the building with its tail. We learned that t-rex’s arms really are tiny, just like the cartoons portray them to be.

One of my favorite exhibits was about China. They had reconstructed homes, a restaurant, supermarket, calligraphy store, panda research center, and train ride. In the calligraphy shop they had practice surface that we painted with water but it turned black as if we were writing with ink. We all tried our hand at writing a few characters. We also sat in for part of a percussion demonstration and Emily played a few instruments.

We enjoyed a picnic lunch outside between our cars in the parking lot after a couple of hours of exploration. We headed inside for a final hour to look at a few more exhibits. Emily found this cart outside the Hollywood exhibit and climbed right up. She did not want to sit on the bench at all, so our family picture took a little convincing.

Emily giving story boarding a try. Her story was all about hats, naturally (she always tells us what she is drawing or what she wants us to draw on her paper, and lately it has been hats 90% of the time).

Andrew, Ryan, and Emily went to a Transformers exhibit while Hannah and I checked out these miniature houses and then a Ryan White, Ruby Bridges, and Anne Frank exhibit.

At two we parted ways and headed back home. We have to go back to the museum soon – there was so much we didn’t see!